“It can take up to one month for sloths to completely DIGEST a meal.”
National Geographic Kids, 5,000 Facts, sloth #7
Sloths are folivores, meaning an animal that specializes in eating leaves. The sloth has an incredibly low metabolism and a four chamber stomach that makes up 30 % of their body weight. It takes a minute or two to digest these leaves of the wild. They do not have incisors so they have to smack their lips together to eat a leaf. That’s time consuming itself.
The kind of leaves they eat are high in cellulose which are very hard to break down, and that’s why they like to eat the younger leaves on the farthest limbs of a tree that have less cellulose in them. The four chamber stomach helps break down the leaves by fermentation by bacteria. Their stomach is permanently full because the digestion takes a long time. A leaf diet is a very low calorie and poor nutrition diet, so they have to make every moment count.
However, a sloth can starve to death even on it’s full stomach if the temperature outside fluctuates radically. Sloth’s biological system can’t adapt to the temperature of the air as other mammals so they rely on the consistency of the weather and needs the higher temperatures for the bacteria to break down the leaves appropriately. That is why they are found mainly in stable tropical conditions like the rain forest. However, lately the weather has not been as congruent as it used to be, leaving a lot of starving sloths showing up at rescue centers or just dying to the environmental conditions of the now ever changing climate of the Amazon forest.
It’s starting to seem that sloths enjoy taking the pleasures of life at a slow pace and enjoy every moment, in eating and moving. Maybe that’s the lesson to be learned from these animals.
http://www.slothconservation.org (donate!)
Wikipedia
CHARLEY WAFFLE 