Two-toed

sloth

Choloepus didactylus

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IUCN Red List status:

Least Concern

For more info on classifications visit www.iucnredlist.org

Diet

Sloths are OMNIVORES eating insects, small lizards and carrion. However, their diet consists mostly of buds, tender shoots and leaves

Habitat

They can be found in lowland and tropical forest of northern South America

Fun Fact

When they have eaten well, the contents of a sloth's stomach will make up about two thirds of its body weight!

Fun Fact

Sloths only come down from the trees to POO (which happens about once a week)!

The two-toed sloth does everything while hanging upside down from trees including eating, sleeping, mating and even giving birth!

Sloths move very slowly and sleep for up to 15 hours a day to conserve their energy. This is mostly
down to their diet, which is made up of low-energy food like leaves and fruit. Their food isn’t very nutritious and can take up to three weeks to digest, so they have multi-chambered stomachs to help aid this process. They also have enamel-less teeth which are adapted to cope with this tough diet.

If you spend a lot of time hanging in trees then you need to be able to hold tight, so sloths
have a very powerful grip as well as a curved spine which helps them live upside-down. Despite this powerful grip, sloths actually have a relatively low muscle mass of around 25% – mammals usually have around twice as much.