But they weigh much less than other wildlife their size, which is helpful for life in the trees. With a muscle mass of only 25 percent (most mammals have twice as much), sloths can’t shiver when it’s cold. Yet sloths are great swimmers and can drop from a tree into a river to swim across it while doing the breaststroke! When sleeping, sloths often curl up in a ball in the fork of a tree. These claws are handy for hanging onto tree branches but make walking on the ground awkward. Their curved, sharp claws are 3 to 4 inches (8 to 10 centimeters) long. Sloths live in trees in the tropical and cloud forests of Central and South America. This chilling phenomenon is called cold-weather orphan syndrome, as sometimes the youngster falls to the ground and needs to be rescued by humans. The young continues to nurse as its mother starves to death. This causes the bacteria in her stomach to stop working, so the mother can no longer digest her food. If there is a long period of cool, rainy weather, a nursing female can get too cold. It has the lowest and most variable body temperature of any mammal, ranging from 74 to 92 degrees Fahrenheit (24 to 33 degrees Celsius). If our own body temperature changes more than five degrees, it means we are sick! The two-toed sloth is different. And, if needed, sloths can move quickly through the trees. They defend themselves with their sharp claws and teeth.

To move to a new area of trees, sloths often wait for the forest to flood and then swim to their next home.īig forest cats like jaguars and ocelots, birds of prey such as harpy eagles, and large snakes like anacondas prey upon sloths. Two-toed sloths rarely descend to the forest floor. This allows water to run off during rainstorms!Įach strand of sloth fur has grooves that collect algae, giving sloths a greenish tint during the wet season. To accommodate their upside-down lifestyle, the hair parts in the middle of the belly and grows upward toward the back. Sloths are the only mammals whose hair grows in the opposite direction from the hair of other mammals.

They eat, sleep, mate, and give birth from this position hanging high among the branches.

In a nutshell, sloths are slow-moving, nocturnal creatures that spend almost their entire life upside down in the trees. Present-day sloths are much smaller, and live in trees. They became extinct about 10,000 years ago. These ground sloths had long claws and ate plants. They ranged in size from an average-size dog to that of an elephant. 'Leaf it' to the sloth: Thousands of years ago, large ground sloths roamed the United States.

Sloth swimming