Brown-throated Sloth - Behaviour and Diet

Behaviour and Diet

Brown-throated sloths sleep 15 to 18 hours every day and are active for only a few brief periods, which may be during either the day or night. Although they can walk along the ground, and even swim, they spend most of their lives in the high branches of trees, descending once every eight days or so to defecate in the soil. Adult animals are solitary, except when raising young, and males have been observed to fight one another using their foreclaws.

Brown-throated sloths inhabit the high canopy of the forest, where they eat young leaves from a wide range of different trees. They do not travel far, with home ranges of only around 0.5 to 9 hectares (1.2 to 22 acres), depending on the local environment. Within a typical, 5-hectare (12-acre) range, a brown-throated sloth will visit around 40 trees, and may specialise on one particular species, even spending up to 20% of its time in a single specific tree. Thus, although the species are generalists, individual sloths may feed on a relatively narrow range of leaf types.

In addition to the algae in their fur, brown-throated sloths also live commensally with a species of moth, Cryptoses choloepi, which lives in their fur, and lays its eggs in the dung. Jaguars and Harpy Eagles are among the few natural predators of the brown-throated sloth. The Yellow-headed Caracara has been observed to forage for small invertebrates in the fur of the sloths, apparently without the sloth being disturbed by the attention.

The female of the species is known to emit a loud, shrill scream during the mating season to attract males. It is a cry that sounds like "ay ay". This scream has been remarked to sound exactly like that of a woman screaming. The male can be identified by a black stripe surrounded by orange fur on its back between the shoulders.