![]() Sloths are iconically associated with the Cecropia, and indeed these trees are an important part of reforestation programs that help restore sloth habitat. Read More: Mylodon Giant Sloth, opportunistic omnivore?. ![]() ![]() They inherit these preferences from their mothers. Sloths as a species eat leaves from over 90 different kinds of trees, however, any given individual usually rotates between half a dozen to a dozen kinds of trees. Three-fingered sloth (Bradypus variegatus) eating a cacao pod. The three-fingered sloth eats leaves and occasionally seed pods (like Cacao pods), while the two-fingered sloth has a more varied diet that sometimes includes both seed pods and fruit. From the Latin folium meaning “leaf” (same root word as foliage) and the suffix -vore, meaning “to eat” or “to devour”, it refers to any animal that exclusively or primarily eats leaves.Īll species of sloths are folivores. Sloths eat small quantities of leaves per dayĪ folivore is an animal that specializes in eating leaves.Ambient temperature affects sloths’ digestion.It takes up to 30 days to digest a leaf.Sign up here to get INSIDER's favorite stories straight to your inbox.What Do Sloths Eat? Sloth Diet, Food, and Digestion (And if you relate way too much to the sloth experience, then you might want to get that checked out). The moral of this story is that we should be thankful that our bodies pass waste in a much less painful and dangerous way than a sloth. The general idea behind this, Cliffe says, is to mark a tree for other sloths, basically alerting them that a fertile female is waiting in the canopy above, though more research is needed before any sort of conclusion can actually be drawn. "In my brain, that tells me that it's probably something to do with reproduction because that is the driving fact behind most animals' crazy behaviors." "Whatever is going on, it's got to be kind of life or death for survival," she told The Washington Post. Instead, she says that it may have to do with sex. Though, according to Cliffe, this hypothesis doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, because of the danger a sloth faces on the ground – over half of all sloths die while outside of their trees – and sloths bred in captivity do not need moths or algae to survive, and still do it anyway. So the sloths might go down to the ground to poop so they can provide a place for the moths to lay eggs, ensuring their life cycle. This algae is important to a sloth's survival because it gives the fur a greenish hue – camouflaging the creature from predators – and possibly providing nutrients when eaten or absorbed through the sloth's skin. The team suggests that, in a weird symbiotic relationship, moths that live on sloths help fertilize a type of algae in the sloths' fur. Bittel says that one of the best hypotheses – posed by a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin back in 2014 – is that sloths poop in such a weird way to keep a balance between them and moths. Since pooping is something all animals do in one form or another, why do sloths wait such a long time between bowel movements, and why do they risk their lives, when they could easily just rain poo down from the treetops like other canopy dwellers do? According to Cliffe, once sloths make their way down from their trees, they do a 'poo dance' to dig a small hole to go in.Īfter the deed is done, they do another little dance to slightly cover it up, before heading back up, presumably feeling a whole lot lighter than they were on the way down. Pooping is really the only reason for a sloth to ever leave its tree, and it's the only time they have to stand upright. "You can watch their stomachs physically shrink as they poo," sloth biologist Rebecca Cliffe from Swansea University in the UK told him. According to Jason Bittel at The Washington Post, a sloth can lose one-third of its body weight from pooping, and that amount of feces is no fun to push out.
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