Choloepus hoffmanni


• GEOGRAPHIC RANGE: Honduras to NW South America down to Bolivia; sea level to 11,000 Ft; in primary and secondary forests.
• SIZE: 8 – 17 lbs; 24”
• Nocturnal
• Arboreal-favors trees covered with many vines and with crowns exposed to sun and prefers to rest in the middle of the liana tangles.
• Folivore-though known to forage on buds, flowers, twigs, fruit, and might occasionally eat insects, bird eggs or small vertebrates.
• Sloths breakdown cellulose through a process of bacterial fermentation in a many-chambered stomach, which is almost a third of their body weight.
• The mother chews the leaves and passes them to the young so that the bacterium necessary for digestion is transferred to the young.
• Sloths compensate for their large guts and low-energy diets by having relatively little muscle-much less
• They have the lowest and most variable body temperature of any mammal-77 to 96° F.
• HOME RANGE; 5 – 7 acres. They occur at a lower density than the three-toed sloth.
• Females are sexually mature at 2 years of age, it can be up to 4 years for a male. Gestation is 11- 1/2 months. Single young nurse for about a month.
• Females appear to greatly outnumber males in the wild. This bias might compensate in part for the long gestation periods and increase reproductive efficiency; if two-toed sloths mate only infrequently, few males are needed to get the job done.
• While almost all other mammals consistently have seven neck vertebrae, a two-toed sloth has 6 to 8.
• To accommodate their upside-down lifestyle, the fur slants from the belly toward the back.
• This order, Xenarthrans, refers to some unusual physiological traits such as an extra spur found on the lower vertebrae. These anomalies are found only in the first placental mammals. Ant
eaters and armadillos share these peculiar characteristics and help make the order for some of the oldest mammals that largely evolved in South America.


A Sloth Legend...

Many rainforest cultures regarded the sloth as a cosmological symbol.

In the extraordinary book “Portraits of a Rainforest” its author, Adrian Forsyth unravels the legend of “...the Tucuna Indians... it was the sloth that let the light into the world”. It is a most intriguing story including such characters as the night monkey, ants and termites, a squirrel and the sloth and the fruit of the Parkia tree helped create stars and the giant Ceiba tree was cloaking the world in darkness...