Three-Toed Sloth
From Costa Rica Travel Guide: Vacation and Travel tips
Three-Toed Sloth
Three-toed sloths are active by day or night and feeds on leaves, twigs and buds. An individual may utilize up to 40 trees in order to feed, but will spend most of its time feeding in its favorite trees. Although it is true that many three-toed sloths feed a great deal on the leaves of the cecropia trees, the myth is not accurate that three-toed sloths feed exclusively on the tree. Some sloths eat little or none from the tree, and no sloth can eat cecropia exclusively, as it doesn’t supply enough dietary requirements to sustain life. The three-toed sloth is an arboreal mammal that lives, feeds, and reproduces near the upper levels of the forest canopy.
It can take four weeks or more for food to pass through a sloth, which gives them the distinction of having one of the slowest food passage times of any mammal. The type and age of a leaf a sloth feeds on can play a pivotal role on its nutritional value and its digestibility; therefore, sloths that do not choose their food carefully could literally die of starvation even though their stomachs are full.
The myth concerning the sloth and the cecropia tree may not be true, but it is true that sloths have the peculiar habit of descending to the ground about once a week to urinate and defecate. Between these visits to the ground, they do not evacuate at all, but they can lose as much as a third of their body weight in fecal pellets and urine in one trip. This can be very dangerous for the sloth and they become very susceptible to predators when they move out of the relative safety of the canopy. Why they do this is open to speculation, but one theory does seem to hold water. A sloth is host to numerous arthropods- including beetles, moths, and mites that live in the coat of the sloth and pass the egg and larval stages of their life cycles in sloth dung. One sloth can be home to a 100 or so moths and 1,000 beetles. It is likely that the sloth somehow benefits in some way on the arthropods, which in turn depend on the sloth’s weekly defecation trips to complete its life cycle.
The gestation time of a three-toed sloth is six months, and results in a single baby weighing about a half a pound. A baby sloth eats by licking the lips of its mother about two weeks after being born. The baby clings to its mother for the first four months, eating whatever the mother eats. The mother abandons the baby after about six months and moves to another part of her territory, leaving the juvenile in the area to which it was raised. The young sloth will leave its mothers territory after about a year, but retains her taste in vegetation. The mother plays a significant role in the food preference of her young, and different sloth lineages frequently have quite different tastes. This variation in diet seems to reduce the competition between sloths for certain foods and helps explain why there can be up to 8 sloths living in a relatively small area.
Because of deforestation and human disturbance, sloths have suffered vast losses of habitat over recent decades. However, where the forest is still standing, sloths are among the most abundant of the Costa Rican mammals. Although sloths have had their own problems, deforestation and human disturbance have had a bigger impact on two of the sloths arch enemies- the jaguar, and the harpy eagle. The jaguar is all but extinct in Costa Rica, and the Harpy eagle; once plentiful have all but disappeared. The future looks a little brighter for the three-toed sloth, at least in Costa Rica.
