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Three-Toed Sloth

Physical Characteristics
 

  • They have long coarse hair over their dense underfur

  • Face is white with brown strips on either side of their head

  • Throat is brown

  • Body ranges from pale brown to yellowish

  • They have three toes on its front and hind feet

Habitat
 

  • ​They like to live in tropical evergreen forests

    • They prefer forests at low elevations with continuous canopy cover

  • They are found in southern Honduras all the way to northern Argentina

  • Three-Toed Sloths are found in the Corcovado and Santa Rosa National Park along with the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve

Behavior
 

  • They eat leaves of up to 30 species of lianas and trees

  • The chosen species depends on what the sloth's mother taught it to eat

  • They are active during the day

  • They change trees every 1.5 days to balance their diet

  • Around once a week a sloth comes down from the trees to dig a hole and go to the bathroom in it

    • After this, it goes back to the trees

Other Facts
 

  • They have high mortaility rates as a child, but an adult has extremely low mortality rate

    • They are thought to live up to 20 or 30 years old in the wild

  • In Latin, their name is the Bradypus variegatus

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