What Do Sloths Eat?
Sloth Diet, Food, and Digestion
Sloths are folivores
It takes up to 30 days to digest a leaf
Ambient temperature affects sloths’ digestion
Sloths eat small quantities of leaves per day
Sloths have unusual toilet habits
What is a folivore?
A folivore is an animal that specializes in eating leaves. 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.
All species of sloths are folivores. 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.
What kinds of trees do sloths eat?
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. They inherit these preferences from their mothers.
Sloths drink water
A long-held presumption in ecology is that sloths get all the water they need from the foliage they consume, and few documented observations exist of either of the two sloth genera (Bradypus and Choloepus) drinking in the wild.
How are sloth toilet habits unusual?
Sloths are very particular about how and when they go to the bathroom. Although they live in the canopy, they travel all the way to the forest floor to poop. Wild sloths defecate approximately once per week, and they can poop out as much as 30% of their body weight when they do.
Sloths’ pooping ritual involves climbing down to the base of a tree, doing a special “poop dance” that includes wiggling their rear end back and forth, and in the case of three-fingered sloths, digging a small hole with their tail to poop in. Two-fingered sloths do not have tails and skip this step. When they are finished, the sloth climbs back up the tree and resumes hanging out in the canopy. Sloth feces is rich with nutrients and makes an excellent fertilizer for the trees they inhabit.
6 сен 2024
