Featured Animal: Two Toed Sloth

 

 Two Toed Sloth 

 

So, time for a creature feature!

In recent months, the internet has gone crazy for sloths. Pictures and memes featuring these fuzzy critters have popped up everywhere, and the internet seems obsessed by them.

 

Linnaeus' Two Toed Sloth

Sloths are members of the family Xenarthra, which consists of armadillos, anteaters and of course, sloths. Members of this family are only found in the Americas, and are all pretty bizarre. 

  Found throughout the tropical rainforests of Central and South America, sloths spend their lives hanging from the branches of trees. 

They are considered to be foliovores, due to the majority of their diet being leaves. Fruit is also occasionally taken, but leaves are the bulk of their diet. A sloth's digestive system is well evolved to slowly break down leaves, which are pretty undigestible, and hold very little in the way of nutrition. Because of this slow digestive process, the sloth has very little energy (or need) to do much at all. 

Sloths are perfectly adapted to an upside down arboreal lifestyle. Their large hooked claws help them grip onto branches, and aid them in reaching leaves to feed from. The sloth's internal organs are also arranged "upside down" inside to compensate for the reversed lifestyle. The coat of a sloth is usually home to algae and other small organisms which grow or live in the fur of the largly dormant animal. A slight coating of algae also helps camoflage the sloth.

 Sloths famously only come down from the trees to poo, and this is on average of once a week. The sloth slowly crawls down its tree, does its business, covers it with dirt, then slowly makes its way back up again. It is during this time that the sloth is most vulnerable to predation, mainly from jaguars. Harpy Eagles are also reported to have snatched sloths from branches. 

So there we have it; the sloth, a leaf eating, algae infested bundle of fur that defacates once a week.