There are different species of sloth bear although all of them are classified as toothless, an order of mammals whose main characteristic is that they lack incisor teeth, anteaters and armadillos also belong to this group.
This is an animal that spends most of the day dozing in the branches of trees but when it decides to move to feed or to make a postural change it can go practically unnoticed because it does so with an extreme slowness, so much so that observing its movement is similar to seeing the slow growth of a plant, hence the name sloth bear.
If you want to discover more about this fascinating mammal, in this article on our site we'll talk about feeding the sloth bear. Remember that the sloth bear is an animal in serious danger of extinction that we must protect.
Where does the sloth live?
The habitat of an animal is of great importance for its feeding since the sloth must find enough food in its environment to cover its nutritional requirements.
This is a mammal native to Central and South America that generally lives in dense forests and tropical jungles, this is due to that the organism of the sloth bear hardly has the capacity to maintain a stable body temperature, therefore, it needs a warm environment without climatic variations.
Most of its time is spent in the trees, where it has its food within reach of its claws, since due to its scant muscles it is a mammal that can barely walk on its legs, that is another factor that contributes to the slowness of your movement.
The digestive system of the sloth bear
The sloth bear has a stomach that has several compartments, a characteristic that it shares with ruminants, being the clearest example of this group the cows.
The structure of the sloth bear's stomach, as well as the microbial flora it naturally possesses, are absolutely necessary for it to fully digest the cellulose in vegetables. The different compartments of the stomach serve to separate the ingested food and facilitate its digestion, since the food of the sloth bear is rich in fiber and its complete digestion it may take even a month.
In line with this phenomenon we should also mention that due to the sloth's slow metabolism it needs very little food.
What does the sloth eat?
The sloth bear belongs to the suborder "Folívora" a term that comes from Latin and literally means "leaf eater", like this that this mammal bases its diet mainly on leaves, flowers and tender stems, which it can easily obtain without having to leave its home, that is, the top of the tree where it has decided to live.
The sloth bear, an ecological animal
The sloth bear seems to feel some gratitude towards the tree that offers him food and we can deduce this through one of his behaviors, highly ecological.
This animal only comes down from the tree once a week to perform its physiological needs, something that it could technically do by climbing the branches, however, the sloth prefers to dig a hole at the base of the tree, deposit their feces there and later bury them, in this way, their depositions act as fertilizer and in a certain way return to the tree part of the nutrients that the bear has ingested.
An animal in serious danger of extinction
The sloth's slow, relaxed demeanor makes it possible for poachers to take advantage of it. Especially in the case of the three-toed sloth we find an animal that has suffered the slaughter of adult specimens in order to steal the young and market them as "pets".
