Overview

Did you know folks love their Sloths? It's true. They are mild mannered and loving little pets and do a whole lot of sleeping. They make great parents and thought to be one of the more affectionate animals.

Details

Sloths are the six species of medium-sized mammals belonging to the families Megalonychidae (two-toed sloth) and Bradypodidae (three-toed sloth). They are part of the order Pilosa and are therefore related to armadillos and anteaters, which sport a similar set of specialized claws. Sloths are arboreal (tree dwelling) residents of the jungles of Central and South America, and are known for being slow-moving. The sloth's taxonomic suborder is Folivora, while some call it Phyllophaga. Both names mean "leaf-eaters"; derived from Latin and Greek respectively. Names for the animals used by tribes in Ecuador include Ritto, Rit and Ridette, mostly forms of the word "sleep", "eat" and "dirty" from Tagaeri tribe of Huaorani. Sloths are classified as folivores as the bulk of their diet consists mostly of buds, tender shoots, and leaves, mainly of Cecropia trees. Some two-toed sloths have been documented as eating insects, small reptiles and birds as a small supplement to their diet. Linnaeus's two-toed sloth has recently been documented eating human feces from open latrines.[2] They have made extraordinary adaptations to an arboreal browsing lifestyle. Leaves, their main food source, provide very little energy or nutrition and do not digest easily. Sloths therefore have large, specialized, slow-acting stomachs with multiple compartments in which symbiotic bacteria break down the tough leaves. As much as two-thirds of a well-fed sloth's body-weight consists of the contents of its stomach, and the digestive process can take a month or more to complete. Even so, leaves provide little energy, and sloths deal with this by a range of economy measures: they have very low metabolic rates (less than half of that expected for a mammal of their size), and maintain low body temperatures when active (30–34 °C or 86–93 °F), and still lower temperatures when resting. Although unable to survive outside the tropical rainforests of South and Central America, within that environment sloths are outstandingly successful creatures. Four of the six living species are presently rated "least concern"; the maned three-toed sloth (Bradypus torquatus), which inhabits Brazil's dwindling Atlantic Forest, is classified as "endangered", while the island-dwelling pygmy three-toed sloth (B. pygmaeus) is critically endangered.