Ok first I have to just say that Sloth’s are by far my favorite animal on t he entire planet. They are a fascinating species and so at the bottom of this article there is loads of additional information and facts about them
Baby Sloth Delivered Via C-Section For the First Time
After a pregnant sloth fell out of a tree in Costa Rica, veterinarians performed a caesarean operation to deliver her pre-term baby. The procedure was successful, but sadly, a few days later, both mother and baby died.
The remarkable story, detailed in The Sloth Diaries on the Sloth Institute Costa Rica site, begins on September 27, when a local hotel employee witnessed a three-toed sloth fall from a tree. The adult brown-throated sloth (Bradypus variegatus) was taken to the Kids Saving the Rainforest wildlife rescue clinic, where Sam Trull from the Sloth Institute discovered that the injured female was pregnant. She hadn’t fractured her skull, but she did have a seizure and wasn’t moving much. When she started showing signs of labor and an hour-long contraction that didn’t result in a baby, Trull brought the sloth momma to a veterinarian in nearby Herradura.
CT scans and X-rays revealed that the baby was breeched — feet-first, rather than head-first — and because the mother was holding onto urine and feces in her abdominal cavity, the baby likely wasn’t going to change its position. After using an ultrasound machine to confirm the baby’s heartbeat and exact position, a team of vets decided to perform what’s believed to be the first-ever sloth c-section on October 1.
In order to reach the uterus, they first had to remove over 100 milliliters of urine from the mother’s bladder (sloths can hold up to 30 percent of their body weight in waste over the course of a week). Once the womb was located, the vets successfully extracted the baby from the anaesthetized mom in a 30-minute procedure. They removed fetal fluids that might restrict the baby’s airways and cleaned intrauterine tissue out of the claws. To increase the baby’s body temperature, Trull held her “skin-to-skin†against her own chest. Here is a photo of the mother and baby a couple days after the operation.
Because of her neurological problems, the mother couldn’t feed or take care of her baby properly, and the baby had a heart murmur and possible lung and feeding problems, BBC reports. The baby died on October 8. The mother suffered a stroke and died the next day. “It was devastating but not entirely surprising,” Trull tells BBC. “I was at least able to unite mother and baby before they died, so it might not have been a very long life but at least it was a life.”
Fun Fact and Information about Sloths
Sloths are medium-sized mammals belonging to the families Megalonychidae (two-toed sloth) and Bradypodidae (three-toed sloth), classified into six species. They are part of the order Pilosa and are therefore related to anteaters, which sport a similar set of specialized claws. Extant sloths are arboreal (tree-dwelling) residents of the jungles of Central and South America, and are known for being slow-moving, and hence named “sloths”. Extinct sloth species include a few species of aquatic sloths and many ground sloths, some of which attained the size of elephants.
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.[4] 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 symbiotic bacteria break down the tough leaves. Sloths’ tongues have the unique ability to protrude from their mouths 10 to 12 inches, an ability that is useful for collecting leaves just out of reach.[5] 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.
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Subclass: Theria
Infraclass: Eutheria
Superorder: Xenarthra
Order: Pilosa
Suborder: Folivora, Delsuc, Catzeflis, Stanhope, and Douzery,
Families
Bradypodidae
Megalonychidae
>Megatheriidae
>Mylodontidae
>Nothrotheriidae
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. On Barro Colorado Island in Panama, sloths have been estimated to comprise 70% of the biomass of arboreal mammals. 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.
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. 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 defense. A cornered sloth may swipe at its attackers in an effort to scare them away or wound them. Despite sloths’ apparent defenselessness, 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.
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. 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 defense. A cornered sloth may swipe at its attackers in an effort to scare them away or wound them. Despite sloths’ apparent defenselessness, 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.
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. Consistent with this, they reportedly relieve themselves from their branches during storms in the rainy season. 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. Still other recent studies have suggested that it might be relevant for maintaining the ecosystem in the sloths’ fur 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.[18] Recently there has been some speculation that sloths go to the ground to defecate because of their mutually beneficial relationships with moths. While the sloth defecates, female moths that otherwise live on a sloth will get off and immediately lay their eggs directly on the fecal matter, on which the larvae survive until they mature to adulthood and are able to fly onto sloths. Incidentally, it appears that sloths benefit from their relationship with moths because the moths are responsible for fertilizing algae on the sloth, which provides them with nutrients.
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.
Sloths are members of the superorder Xenarthra, a group of mammals that appeared in South America about 60 million years ago (Mya), although at least one source puts the date at which sloths and related animals broke off from other placental mammals at about 100 Mya. 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.
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. 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.
Fun Facts on Sloths
They aren’t that slothful
Sloths have long had a reputation for just lying around and doing nothing for most of their existence. A recent study, however, negates that long held belief. The Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany studied the brain wave patterns of three-toed sloths in the Panamanian rainforest instead of those in captivity by fixing a brainwave cap to each of the animals. The data showed that the wild sloths only slept just over 9 1/2 hours a day and not the 15 to 20 hours on average that science recorded from captive sloths.
They can retain their grip after death
Since they spend most of their time in trees, sloths’ muscles and limbs have been engineered to climb trunks to find food and escape predators. They spend so much time in the trees that the tree holds their very life in the balance, sometimes even after they’ve died, according to National Geographic. Thanks to their claws and muscles, the grip of a sloth is so strong that sometimes when they die, they are found still clinging to the very branch they were lounging from when they were alive.
All sloths have three-toes, even the “two-toed†ones
The name might sound like a simple way to describe this gentle creature, but even names in nature can be misleading. It’s true that two-toed sloths only have two claws on their forelimbs, but both the two-toed and three-toed sloth have three claws on their hind-limbs. That means two-toed sloths have “two fingers,†not “two toesâ€. The discrepancy derives from the names in the Spanish translation for the two-toed sloth, “Perezoso de Dos Dedos.†“Dedos†means fingers, which caused some confusion for the English translation.
There used to be “mega-slothsâ€
Sloths may not look very menacing or even dangerous, but if their ancestors caught you, they could make you wish for a quick and swift death. As early as 10,000 years ago in the Pliocene epoch, the giant Megatherium (aka “the giant slothâ€) roamed the Earth. They lived in what is now South America and have been described as the same size as the modern rhinoceros before their extinction. They were mainly herbivores, but some paleontologists suggest they could have been “opportunistic carnivores†if they needed to defend themselves from predators or other Megatheriums.
Its dirtiness creates its own ecosystem for other life
Spending most of your time in a tree can take it’s toll, especially if you come from a species that doesn’t consider showering a priority. The sloth’s hairy body has developed a deep groove that serves as the habitat for colonies of symbiotic algae that can turn the sloth’s fur green during the rainy season to help it camouflage with its environment. Moths have also been found the flurry region where they feed off of the algae and hide from potential predators.
Sloths only go to the bathroom once a week
Part of the reason why so many people consider sloths to be slothful is their diet. They have a very low metabolism and have to eat a lot to get the nutrients their body needs. Since it takes so long for a sloth to digest the food it eats, it only urinates or defecates about once a week, usually during the few times it leaves the tree.
Three-toed sloths can turn their heads almost 360 degrees
Being able to turn your head almost all the way around might not serve as much function in nature as having claws or sharp teeth (unless sloths go to bars we don’t know about yet where they impress their friends with bar tricks), but three-toed sloths are slightly more advanced than their two-toed cousins. They can turn their necks up to 270 degrees around in either direction because they have up to three extra vertebrae than two-toed sloths.
PDF Documents on Sloths
> Sloth Guide Book
> Physiology of Two and Three Toed Sloths
> Behavioral and Rehabilitation Studies
> Sloth Facts Sheet
Baby two-toed sloth at Jaguar Rescue Center in Costa Rica
I had to add this one because, well just look at it’s tiny tiny face 
Documentary on the Pygmy Sloth
And finally some awesome pictures of Sloths
– Credit and Resource –
Wikipedia
Baby Sloth Delivered Via C-Section For the First Time Ever
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