Sloths make a good habitat for other organisms, and a single sloth may be home to moths, beetles, cockroaches,
ciliates, fungi, and algae.
[2]
Taxonomy and names
The sloth's taxonomic
suborder is
Folivora, while some call it
Phyllophaga. Both names mean "leaf-eaters"; derived from
Latin and
Greek, respectively. Names for the animals used by tribes in
Ecuador include
ritto,
rit, and
ridette, mostly forms of the word "sleep", "eat", and "dirty" from
Tagaeri tribe of
Huaorani.
Ecology
Sloths are classified as
folivores, as the bulk of their diets consist of buds, tender shoots, and leaves, mainly of
Cecropia trees. Some two-toed sloths have been documented as eating
insects, small reptiles, and birds as a small supplement to their diets.
Linnaeus's two-toed sloth has recently been documented eating human faeces from open latrines.
[3] They have made extraordinary adaptations to an
arboreal browsing lifestyle. Leaves, their main food source, provide very little energy or nutrients, and do not digest easily. Sloths, therefore, have large, specialized, slow-acting
stomachs with multiple compartments in which
symbioticbacteria break down the tough leaves. As much as two-thirds of a well-fed sloth's body weight consists of the contents of its stomach, and the digestive process can take a month or more to complete.
Since leaves provide little energy, sloths deal with this by a range of economy measures: they have very low
metabolic rates (less than half of that expected for a mammal of their size), and maintain low body temperatures when active (30–34°C or 86–93°F), and still lower temperatures when resting.
Although unable to survive outside the tropical rainforests of South and Central America, within that environment sloths are outstandingly successful creatures. Four of the six living
species are presently rated "least concern"; the
maned three-toed sloth (
Bradypus torquatus), which inhabits Brazil's dwindling
Atlantic Forest, is classified as "endangered", while the island-dwelling
pygmy three-toed sloth (
B. pygmaeus) is critically endangered.
Physiology
Sloth fur exhibits specialized functions: the outer hairs grow in a direction opposite from that of other mammals. In most mammals, hairs grow toward the extremities, but because sloths spend so much time with their legs above their bodies, their hairs grow away from the extremities to provide protection from the elements while the sloth hangs upside down. In most conditions, the fur hosts two species of
symbiotic cyanobacteria, which provide camouflage.
[4][5] Because of the cyanobacteria, sloth fur is a small ecosystem of its own, hosting many species of non-parasitic insects. Sloths have short, flat heads, big eyes; short snouts, long legs, and tiny ears. Some species have stubby tails (6–7 cm long). Altogether, sloths' bodies usually are between 50 and 60 cm long.
Sloths' claws serve as their only natural defence. A cornered sloth may swipe at its attackers in an effort to scare them away or wound them. Despite sloths' apparent defencelessness, predators do not pose special problems: sloths
blend in with the trees and, moving only slowly, do not attract attention. Only during their infrequent visits to ground level do they become vulnerable. The main predators of sloths are the
jaguar, the
harpy eagle, and humans. The majority of recorded sloth deaths in Costa Rica are due to contact with
electrical lines and
poachers. Their claws also provide a further unexpected deterrent to human hunters; when hanging upside-down in a tree, they are held in place by the claws themselves and often do not fall down even if shot from below.
Despite their adaptation to living in trees, sloths (like many other rainforest animals) make competent swimmers. This is likely to have been true of the extinct ground sloths, as well, as evidenced by the fact that
megalonychid sloths were able to
colonise the
Antilles by the
Oligocene, and that the megalonychid
Pliometanastes and the mylodontid
Thinobadistes were able to colonize North America about 9 million years ago ago, well before the existence of the
Isthmus of Panama. Additionally, the nothrotheriid
Thalassocnus of the west coast of South America became adapted to a semiaquatic marine lifestyle.
[6]
Sloths move only when necessary and even then very slowly; they have about a quarter as much muscle tissue as other animals of similar weight. They can move at a marginally higher speed if they are in immediate danger from a predator (4 m or 13 ft per minute for the three-toed sloth), but they burn large amounts of energy doing so. Their specialised hands and feet have long, curved claws to allow them to hang upside down from branches without effort.
[7] While they sometimes sit on top of branches, they usually eat, sleep, and even give birth hanging from limbs. They sometimes remain hanging from branches after death. On the ground, the maximum speed of the three-toed sloth is 2 m or 6.5 ft per minute.
[8]
Sloths were thought to be among the most
somnolent animals, sleeping from 15 to 18 hours each day. Recently, however, Dr. Neil Rattenborg and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, published a study testing sloth sleep patterns in the wild; this is the first study of its kind. The study indicated that sloths sleep just under 10 hours a day.
[9]
Sloths go to the ground to urinate and defecate about once a week, digging a hole and covering it afterwards. They go to the same spot each time and are vulnerable to predation while doing so. The reason for this risky behaviour is unknown, although some believe it is to avoid making noise while defecating from up high that would attract predators.
[10] Consistent with this, they reportedly relieve themselves from their branches during storms in the rainy season.
[11] Another possible explanation is that the
middens provide the sloths with one of their few methods of finding one another for breeding purposes, since their sense of smell is far more acute than their eyesight or hearing.
[12] Individual sloths tend to spend the bulk of their time feeding on a single "modal" tree; by burying their excreta near the trunk of that tree, they may help nourish it.
Infant sloths normally cling to their mothers' fur, but occasionally fall off.
[citation needed] Sloths are very sturdily built and rarely die from a fall. In some cases, they die from a fall indirectly because the mothers prove unwilling to leave the safety of the trees to retrieve the young.
[citation needed] Females normally bear one baby every year, but sometimes sloths' low level of movement actually keeps females from finding males for longer than one year.
Almost all
mammals have seven
cervical vertebrae (neck bones), including those with very short necks, such as
elephants or
whales, and those with very long necks, such as
giraffes). The few exceptions include
manatees and two-toed sloths, which each have only six cervical vertebrae, and three-toed sloths with 9 cervical vertebrae.
[14]
Evolution
Sloths are members of the superorder
Xenarthra, a group of
mammals that appeared about 60 million years ago (Mya),
[15] although at least one source puts the date at which sloths and related animals broke off from other placental mammals at about 100 Mya.
[16] Also included among the Xenarthra are
anteaters and
armadillos. The earliest xenarthrans were
arboreal herbivores with sturdy spines, fused pelvises, stubby teeth, and small brains.
[15]
The living sloths belong to one of two families, known as the
Megalonychidae ("two-toed" sloths) and the
Bradypodidae (three-toed sloths). All living sloths have in fact three
toes; the "two-toed" sloths, however, have only two
fingers. Two-toed sloths are generally faster-moving than three-toed sloths. Both types tend to occupy the same forests; in most areas, one species of three-toed sloth and one species of the larger two-toed type will jointly predominate.
However, their
adaptations belie the actual relationships of the living sloth
genera, which are more distant from each other than their outward similarity suggests. The common ancestor of the two genera apparently lived 35–40 Mya, making the living forms stunning examples of
convergent or
parallel evolution.
[17] The two-toed sloths of today are far more closely related to one particular group of ground sloths than to the living three-toed sloths. Whether these ground-dwelling Megalonychidae were descended from tree-climbing ancestors or whether the two-toed sloths are really miniature ground sloths converted (or reverted) to arboreal life cannot presently be determined to satisfaction. The latter possibility seems slightly more likely, because the small ground sloths
Acratocnus and
Neocnus, which were also able to climb, are among the closer relatives of the two-toed sloths, and these together were related to the huge ground sloths
Megalonyx and
Megalocnus.
The
evolutionary history of the three-toed sloths is not well known. No particularly close relatives, ground-dwelling or not, have yet been identified.
The ground sloths do not constitute a
monophyletic group. Rather, they make up a number of lineages, and as far as is known, until the
Holocene, most sloths were in fact ground-dwellers. The famous
Megatherium, for example, belonged to a lineage of ground sloths that was not very close to the living sloths and their ground-living relatives, like the small
Neocnus or the massive
Megalonyx. Meanwhile,
Mylodon, among the last ground sloths to disappear, was only very distantly related to either of these.
Classification
........................................................
Second, last week I informed POPSCI, that any video posted from their website, which originates from YouTube would not be seen by some of the military, as YouTube is being blocked..
I guess, they do not care or have not fixed the problem yet.
..........................................
See life in all its beautiful colors, and
from different perspectives too!
Playing Devil's Advocate since 1978
"The only constant in the universe is change"
-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC - 475 BC
www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-05/after-robot-assisted-rehab-and-dose-chemicals-paralyzed-rats-can-walk-again