Tourism: A sloth's lazy life

Sloths are solitary animals which give birth to a single offspring about once in a year. Some sloths can be three-toed, with a black mask around their eyes, a stubby tail, forelimbs that are much longer than the hindlimbs and a yellow- gold patch between their shoulders.

see pictures below

The two-toed species have forelimbs that are about the same size with their hind limbs, long hair which is brownish-gold and soft to touch. The sloth always sleeps curled up in a ball to conserve heat. Its undercoat helps to conserve this heat and a sloth can sleep non-stop for twenty hours in a day!

The sloth's low body temperature gives it an incredibly low metabolic rate. Leaves may take up to a month to go through  various stages of digestion before passing into a sloth's small intestine. A sloth can be clumsy and awkward on the ground but when on the branches of trees, it is so graceful.

Sloths have high immune system. They have the ability to withstand doses of poison that would be lethal to other mammals. Hence a better understanding of the sloth's immune defences can be helpful in medical research.

Zoo Ave in La Garita de Alajuela, Coasta Rica is a center for the rehabilitation and return to the wild of native animals. Here, you see many sloths (one of the world's slowest animals).

The most interesting thing about sloths is that they only defecate and urinate once in a week, and when they do, they dig a hole and bury their excrement. Such interesting little creatures :)