What do sloths eat mostly?

Sloths are medium-sized mammals that live in the Central and South American rainforests.

Table of Contents Show

Sloth Characteristics
Sloth Habitat
Sloth Behaviour
Sloth Reproduction
Sloth Predators
Sloth Conservation Status
Articles that Mention Sloths

The sloth got its name from its slow movement, it is not lazy, just slow-moving. The sloth is the slowest mammal on Earth. In total, there are six species of sloth.

Sloths belong to the families ‘Megalonychidae’ and ‘Bradypodidae’, part of the order ‘Pilosa’. Most scientists call these two families the ‘Folivora’ suborder, while some call it ‘Phyllophaga’.

Family Bradypodidae

Genus (Three-toed sloths)
- Pygmy Three-toed Sloth (Bradypus pygmaeus)
- Maned Three-toed Sloth (Bradypus torquatus)
- Pale-throated Three-toed Sloth (Bradypus tridactylus)
- Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth (Bradypus variegatus)

Family Megalonychidae

Genus (Two-toed sloths)
- Linnaeus’s Two-toed Sloth (Choloepus didactylus)
- Hoffmann’s Two-toed Sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni)

Sloth Characteristics

Sloths have a thick brown and slightly-greenish fur coat and are about the size of a cat around 2 feet (61 centimetres) long. Sloths have a short, flat head, big eyes, a short snout, a short or non-existent tail, long legs, tiny ears and sturdy, curved claws are on each foot.

They use these claws to hang from trees. Sloths claws serve as their only natural defence. A cornered sloth may swipe at its attackers in an effort to scare them away or wound them. Despite their apparent defencelessness, predators do not pose special problems.

In the trees sloths have good camouflage and moving only slowly, do not attract attention. Only during their rare visits to ground level do they become vulnerable.

Some sloths have colonies of green algae encrusting their fur, both adding to the camouflage effect and providing some nutrients to the sloths, who lick the algae during grooming. Sloth fur exhibits specialized functions. The outer hairs grow in a direction opposite from that of other mammals.

In most mammals, hairs grow towards the extremities, but because these animals spend so much time with their legs above their bodies, their hairs grow away from the extremities in order to provide protection from the elements while the sloth hangs upside down.

Sloths are quadrupeds (four-legged animals) who ‘walk’ upside-down along tree branches. They only rarely venture to the ground and walk on the ground in an upright position. They are very good at swimming.

They have made extraordinary adaptations to an arboreal browsing lifestyle. Sloths have very large, specialized, slow-acting stomachs with multiple compartments in which symbiotic (the living together of two dissimilar organisms) bacteria break down the tough leaves.

Sloth Diet

Sloths are omnivores. They may eat insects, small lizards and carrion, however, their diet consists mostly of buds, tender shoots and leaves (including leaves from the cecropia tree). It used to be thought that they ate mostly cecropia leaves because they were often spotted in cecropia trees. It turns out that they also live in many other trees, but are not spotted there as easily as in cecropia trees.

Sloths have a low metabolic rate and a low body temperature (91° Fahrenheit). This keeps their food and water needs to a minimum. They have small molars which they use to chew up their leafy food. Their stomach has many separate compartments that are used to digest the tough cellulose (a component of plant material that they eat).

As much as two-thirds of a well fed sloths body weight consists of the contents of its stomach and the digestive process can take as long as a month or more to complete. Even so, leaves provide little energy and they deal with this by a range of economy measures.

They have very low metabolic rates (less than half of that expected for a creature of their size) and maintain low body temperatures when active (30 to 34 degrees Celsius or 86 to 93 degrees Fahrenheit) and still lower temperatures when resting.

Sloth Habitat

Sloths spend almost all of their lives in trees.

Sloth Behaviour

Sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside-down from tree branches. They eat, sleep, mate and give birth upside-down in the trees. Sloths hold onto tree branches with strong, curved claws that are on each of their four feet.

Males are solitary, shy animals. Females sometimes congregate together. Sloths are nocturnal, they are most active at night and sleep all day. They sleep about 15 to 18 hours each day, hanging upside down.

Sloths move only when necessary and even then very slowly. They have about half as much muscle tissue as other animals of similar weight. They can move at a marginally higher speed if they are in immediate danger from a predator (4.5 metres (15 feet) per minute), but they burn large amounts of energy doing so.

Sloths sometimes remain hanging from branches after death. On the ground their maximum speed is 1.5 metres (5 feet) per minute. They mostly move at 15 – 30 centimetres (0.5 – 1 feet) per minute.

Sloths are particularly partial to nesting in the crowns of palm trees where they can camouflage as coconuts. They come to the ground to urinate and defecate only about once a week.

Sloth Reproduction

Sloths may live 10 – 20 years in the wild. Adult females produce a single baby each year, however, sometimes the lack of movement actually keeps females from finding males for longer than one year. They give birth upside down hanging from a tree branch.

Infant sloths normally cling to their mothers fur, but occasionally fall off. They are very sturdily built and rarely die from a fall. In some cases they die from a fall indirectly because the mothers prove unwilling to leave the safety of the trees to retrieve the young.

Sloth Predators

The main predators of sloths are the jaguar, the harpy eagle and humans. The majority of sloth deaths in Costa Rica are from contact with electrical lines and from poachers. Their claws also provide a further unexpected deterrent to human hunters – when hanging upside-down in a tree they are held in place by the claws themselves and often do not fall down even if shot from below.

A sloths main forms of protection are its camouflage (greatly increased by the coating of algae growing on its fur) and its very slow movement. These adaptations make the sloth virtually disappear in the rainforest canopy.

Sloth Conservation Status

Although unable to survive outside the tropical rainforests of South and Central America, within that environment sloths are outstandingly successful creatures. They can account for as much as half the total energy consumption and two-thirds of the total terrestrial mammalian biomass in some areas.

Of the six species, only one, the Maned Three-toed Sloth, has a classification of ‘endangered’ at present.

The ongoing destruction of South America’s forests, however, may soon prove a threat to the others.

Articles that Mention Sloths

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By Martha Adams

i Anup Shah/Photodisc/Getty Images

The sloth, whether he has two toes or three, is a minimalist. He does only what he must to stay alive. He does everything … very … slowly. Most bugs move fast. Therefore, a sloth can eat only bugs that move … very … slowly. Or not at all.

A sloth eats what's in front of him -- mostly leaves, shoots, buds and flowers. He gets water from his food, so he doesn't need to drink. He takes a month to digest a meal and makes the long trip down from his tree to the outhouse once a week. He doesn't have much muscle mass, so he doesn't need much protein in his diet. Consequently, bugs, which offer a lot of protein, are not high on his menu. However, he can acquire some nonvegetable edibles in the process of browsing, making him technically an opportunistic omnivore rather than a strict herbivore or foliovore.

A sloth may feed from 50 or more kinds of trees in the tropical rainforest of the Americas, but his favorite is the cecropia (Cecropia sp.). It grows fast and provides lots of juicy leaves and buds. It does have a drawback, though: this tree has a symbiotic relationship with Azteca ants. The ants live inside the cecropia and take some food from it, but one of the ways the ants benefit the tree is to defend it from things that want to eat its leaves. One of those things would be a sloth. In the process of munching on a cecropia leaf, the sloth might accidentally ingest an ant or two who had the misfortune to be on that particular leaf but would pay for this when thousands of disturbed and angry ants swarmed out to do battle for their home. Very slow movements seem less likely to bring out the ants, but sloths have been filmed beating a hasty -- for them -- retreat from these stinging protectors.

Given that his preferred cecropia trees are so well defended, the sloth will eat from other trees. In doing so he undoubtedly ingests various forms of insects such as caterpillars and eggs. While eating fruit, he takes in small insects such as fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) who are attracted to and captured by the sweet stickiness.

While the three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus) limits himself pretty much to jungle foliage and any attached bugs, the two-toed sloth (Choloepus didactylus) is not too picky to take advantage of any kind of food that crosses his path. He'll eat bird eggs and nestlings if he happens onto a nest, and even small mice and rats if he catches them. Mr. Two-Toes in captivity -- where he is much more likely to survive than his three-toed counterpart -- dines on special dry food made for leaf-eaters, along with a wide assortment of fruits and vegetables, with grapes as his particular passion.