Three-toed Sloth

By: Lizzy Nash

Three-toed sloths were seen on our adventure to the Amazonian Rainforest. These adorable little creatures spend most of their existence in the tops of trees hanging upside-down. Usually, these animals don’t grow to be much larger than two and a half feet. Their hair is coarse and oily to the touch. The male three-toed sloth has a distinctive patch of orange hair on it’s back with a brown stripe down the middle. They are virtually impossible to see unless you have a keen eye and a good set of binoculars. The reason for this is because their greenish-brown hair and their lack of movement camouflage them. Many times they simply look like masses of vegetation.
A three-toed sloth the distinctive three toes on the ends of its incredibly long forearms. Its hind-legs are considerably shorter than its forearms, and they don’t have very much of a tail, in comparison with it’s relative the two-toed sloth.
The main diet of a sloth is that of leaves and assorted buds of flowers or other plants. They chew their food for long amounts of time because they are not equipped with sharp teeth, and they get their only source of liquid from the juices in the leaves. Their main predators, other than humans, are snakes, harpy and other birds, jaguars, and ocelots. When they are in the trees, their camouflage proves to be their best form of defense, but when they are on the ground, their sharp claws can help them out. The only reasons a sloth would come to the ground would be to trade trees to find better leaves to eat or to mate.
A sloth moves very slowly; it’s name in Spanish means “lazy” because of how little they do and how slowly they move. An average of 15 hours of every day in the life of a sloth is spent sleeping. The only other activities that a sloth takes part in daily are eating, mating, and giving birth. What a life!
There are many superstitions about sloths in Peru. One of which says that if a mother eats a sloth, her children after that will either die or be lazy and amount to nothing. Because of this myth, mothers will abstain from eating a sloth until she is done with her childbearing years.