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Two-toed sloths hang from tree branches, suspended by their huge, hook-like claws. The clinging behaviour is a reflex action, and sloths are found still hanging from trees after they die. The sloth spends almost its entire life, including eating, sleeping, mating, and giving birth, hanging upside down from tree branches.
Two-toed sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside down from trees. They cannot walk, so they pull hand-over-hand to move around, which is at an extremely slow rate. Almost all of their movement comes from this suspended upside down position, at a higher degree than even three-toed sloths.
Sloths are a Neotropical group of xenarthran mammals constituting the suborder Folivora, including the extant arboreal tree sloths and extinct terrestrial ground sloths. Noted for their slowness of movement, tree sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside down in the trees of the tropical rainforests of South America and Central America .
Tree sloths: Medium-sized folivores specialized for life hanging upside-down in trees; Ground sloths: Medium to very large ground-living herbivores (and possibly omnivores) Aquatic sloths: Thalassocnus, a medium-sized herbivore, is the only known aquatic sloth
Three-toed sloths do not have a mating season but breed year-round. Male three-toed sloths are attracted to females in estrus by their screams echoing throughout the canopy. Sloth copulation lasts an average of 25 minutes. [22] Male three-toed sloths are strongly polygamous and exclude competitors from their territory.
The pale-throated sloth (Bradypus tridactylus), occasionally known as the ai (/ ˈ ɑː i /), [4] is a species of three-toed sloth that inhabits tropical rainforests in northern South America. It is similar in appearance to, and often confused with, the brown-throated sloth , which has a much wider distribution.
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. [6]
Mylodon is an extinct genus of ground sloth belonging to the family Mylodontidae, known from southern South America.With a total length of 3 to 4 m and a body mass of 1-2 tonnes, it is one of the largest mylodontids (though it was considerably exceeded in size by the mylodontid Lestodon).