Two-Toed Sloth

Field guide

How to recognize a two-toed sloth

The two-toed sloth comes from the rainforest canopy of South America, from the Amazon basin north to Venezuela and the Guianas. Despite the name, it has three claws on each hind foot; it is the two long claws on the front feet that give the species its name. It spends almost its entire life upside-down in the trees, eating, sleeping, mating and even giving birth while hanging from a branch.

The coat. A sloth’s fur grows the opposite way from most mammals’, parting along the belly and running toward the back, so that rain runs off an animal that is hanging upside-down. It has a short, fine undercoat topped with longer, coarse guard hairs. In the humid forest, algae grows in grooves on those hairs and turns the coat faintly green, camouflage that can make a single sloth its own small ecosystem, home to moths, beetles and other tiny creatures living in its fur.

The grip. The long, curved claws are hooks, not fingers. A sloth hangs from them without spending any muscle effort at all, which is why a sleeping sloth does not fall out of its tree. On the ground the same claws make walking awkward, so a sloth on the forest floor drags itself along and is at its most vulnerable.

The neck. Nearly every mammal, from a mouse to a giraffe, has seven neck vertebrae. Two-toed sloths have between five and seven, one of the very few exceptions, and can turn their heads a long way in either direction without moving the rest of their body.

Out on the branches of the sloth habitat on a warm day.

At a glance

Two-toed sloth fast facts

An adult and a young two-toed sloth at Plumpton Park Zoo.

Family life

Raising a baby sloth

Female two-toed sloths are mature at about 3 years old and then breed once a year; males mature at 4 to 5. After a gestation of about six months, the mother gives birth, hanging upside-down, to a small, well-developed baby about 10 inches long and weighing 12 ounces. The baby clings to its mother’s belly for about five weeks, until it is strong enough to move on its own, and the mother keeps feeding and caring for it both before and after it is weaned. Young sloths may even inherit their parents’ home range.

Daily care

Caring for sloths at Plumpton Park

Brooke and Sid are looked after by trained zookeepers, including keepers with four-year degrees, and an on-staff veterinarian.

Our animal-care team provides nutrition, veterinary oversight, enrichment and daily behavioral observation designed to support each sloth’s physical and behavioral well-being. Keepers monitor appetite, movement and behavior every day so subtle changes can be identified early. Warm, humid indoor quarters matter for an animal from the Amazon, and enrichment gives the sloths new routes to climb and food to work for; gifts marked for enrichment go directly to that work, and our animals page shows how it is spent.

Want to get closer? Book a Sloth Encounter to feed and pet our sloths, by appointment.

Indoors on a cool day, coming over to look at the camera.

Spot the difference

Two-toed sloth or something else?

Source: Smithsonian’s National Zoo.

Two of our sloths curled up asleep on the branches.

Conservation

Two-toed sloths and conservation

LEAST CONCERN

Linnaeus’s two-toed sloth is listed as Least Concern by the IUCN, because it lives across a large part of the Amazon basin and tolerates some disturbance. That is not the same as safe. The pressures on it are the ones facing the whole Amazon: forest cleared for large-scale agriculture, logging and mining, wildfires that kill sloths outright or leave them without trees, and an illegal pet trade that takes sloths from the wild across much of their range.

The pet trade deserves a word. Sloths photograph well and look calm when held, but a wild sloth handled by a tourist is a stressed animal, and most sloths taken for the trade die within months. If you love sloths, the way to help is to support forest protection in South America and to never pay to hold one.