The living habits of sloths

The sloth lives on the tree all the year round, hooks the branch and hangs the body upside down with its claws, and moves on the tree. It has a keen sense of smell, and its vision and hearing are not very developed. It feeds on leaves and fruits, and its natural enemies are pythons and birds of prey. At present, it is the only wild animal with plants on its body. Its hair is grayish brown and appears green because its hairs are attached to algae. Let's take a look at the living habits of sloths.

Morphological characteristics of sloth

The sloth is the only wild animal with plants on its body. although it has feet, it cannot walk and relies on its forelegs to drag the body forward. The indumentum is fluffy and thick, the head is short and round, the ear is small and hidden in the hair, the tail is short, the forelimb is 3 fingers, the hindlimb is 3 toes, all have flexible sharp claws, the forelimb is longer than the hindlimb, the upper jaw has 5 pairs of teeth, 4 pairs of lower jaw, a total of 18, gastric fractionation chamber, cervical vertebra 9, for the largest number of mammals, the whole body hair color gray-brown because the body hair is attached to algae, the appearance is green.

Food habits of sloths

Sloths are strict tree dwellers and simple herbivores, mainly eating leaves, buds and fruits. The best food for sloths is low-calorie leaves, which takes several hours to digest. When they are full, they hang upside down from the branches and sleep late. It can be said that they take the tree as their home, rarely go to the ground, hold the branches in their arms, climb upside down, or hang them upside down, and move forward alternately on their limbs. They can hang upside down for a long time. Even sleep in this position.

Breeding habits of sloths

Most species of sloths breed in spring, and the mating time is only about 5 seconds. It is estimated that mating is the only thing that sloths do faster. The gestation period of sloths varies from species to species, usually 4 to 6 months or 9 months, with one litter each, and the baby sloth has been attached to its mother for five weeks after birth.

The habitat of the sloth

The sloth has been highly specialized into arboreal life and has lost the ability to move on the ground. Usually hanging upside down on the branches, the hair is fluffy and intends to grow, and the hair is green with algae, which is difficult to find in the forest. The three-toed sloth is widely distributed, from Honduras in the north to northern Argentina in the south, and the two-toed sloth is slightly narrow in the north to Nicaragua and to the northern Brazil in the south.

The moving speed of the sloth

The sloth is a kind of mammal that is too lazy to do anything, even too lazy to eat or play, and even crawls slowly when being chased and caught as if nothing had happened. In the face of danger, the speed of its escape is no more than 0.2 meters per second. People often compare slowness to turtle crawling, but sloths climb more slowly than turtles.