National Conservation Zoo

Opening times today: 10am - 4pm (Last entry at 3pm)

About

The two-toed sloth does everything while hanging upside down from trees including eating, sleeping, mating and even giving birth! 

 

Sloths move very slowly and sleep for up to 15 hours a day to conserve their energy. This is mostly 
down to their diet, which is made up of low-energy food like leaves and fruit. Their food isn’t very nutritious and can take up to three weeks to digest, so they have multi-chambered stomachs to help aid this process. They also have enamel-less teeth which are adapted to cope with this tough diet. 

 

If you spend a lot of time hanging in trees then you need to be able to hold tight, so sloths have a very powerful grip as well as a curved spine which helps them live upside-down. Despite this powerful grip, sloths actually have a relatively low muscle mass of around 25% – mammals usually have around twice as much. 

Sloth Tina 5 Scaled

Two-toed sloth facts

SPECIES
I am a mammal
FOUND IN
Northern South America
HABITAT
Lowland & tropical forest
DIET
Omnivore

Will eat insects, small lizards & carrion, but mainly buds, shoots & leaves.

AVERAGE SIZE
29in

Weigh about 4 to 8kg.

LIFE SPAN
20 years
ZOO LOCATION
Spirit of the Jaguar
BEHAVIOUR
Docile & arboreal
IUCN red list statusLeast Concern
Animal vulnerability index

Threats

Threat Humans
Human intervention
Threat Hunting
Hunting or collection
Threat Energy Production
Energy Production