Sloth is a type of weird-looking mammal characterized by slow movement in the trees. There are five subspecies of sloths that can be divided in two major groups: two-toed and three-toed sloths. All sloths live in the Central and South America. They prefer life in dense tropical and subtropical rainforests.
Fast facts about Sloths
1. Sloth is a medium sized animal. It is usually 2 to 2.5 feet long, reaching 8 to 17 pounds in weight.
2. Sloths used to be gigantic The prehistoric sloth Megatherium wasn’t small and cute – he was about six or seven metres tall and weighed between four and seven tonnes.
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3. Since they spend most of their time in trees, sloths’ muscles and limbs have been engineered to climb trunks to find food and escape predators. They spend so much time in the trees that the tree holds their very life in the balance, sometimes even after they’ve died.
4. Sloths mainly eat the tree buds, new shoots, fruit and leaves, of the Cecropia tree. Some two-toed sloths also eat insects, small reptiles, and birds.
5. Fur of the sloth can be black, brown or grey. Original colour of the fur is often masked with layers of algae on its surface. This provides a camouflage against predators, by blending the colour of the sloth with the colour of the surrounding vegetation.
6. Sloths have a four-part stomach that very slowly digests the tough leaves they eat, it can sometimes take up to a month for them to digest a meal. Digesting this diet means a sloth has very little energy left to move around making it one of the slowest moving animals in the world.
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7. Sloths only poo once a week.
8. Sloth is a solitary creature that gathers with other sloths only during mating season.
9. Pregnancy in female lasts between 7 and 10 months and ends with one baby. Young sloth needs to grab mother’s fur immediately after birth and find a breast. It will stay with mother between 6 months and 2 years
10. Average lifespan of sloth is 10-16 in the wild and over 30 years in captivity.
