Fun Facts about Sloths

Whether you love sloths or not, these fun facts are sure to make your day.

• Sloths have notoriously poor eyesight. Not only do they see things in black and white (their eyes can’t detect color like our own), they have to rely on their sense of smell to move around and look for food.
• If sloths make you uncomfortable, be glad you didn’t live 10,000 years ago! Sloths evolved from giant ground sloths, creatures that reached 12 feet in height. Yikes!
• While they mainly eat leaves, fruit, and twigs, they’ll occasionally munch on bugs and rodents. This might seem gross to us, but to them, it’s fine dining.
• Just like birds, sea anemones, soft-shell clams, and the octopus, sloths don’t fart. At all.
• While these cute critters spend most of their lives hanging out in trees, there are times they have to leave – mainly, to poop. But pooping isn’t something they do often (only about once a week, sometimes once a month). When they do, they put their lives in danger. They have to leave their habitat to do their business, and because they move slower than other mammals and don’t have anything to hide them, this leaves them vulnerable to predators.
• When they do poop, they don’t mess around. Sloth poop is massive, about one-third of their body weight.
• Sloths don’t just take daily life slow – they like to live long lives, too. Many of these creatures stick around for about 20 years, but some take it to a new level. Take, for example, one Miss C. Miss C lived at the Adelaide Zoo in Australia and managed to make it to the ripe old age of 43. She was born in 1974 and, according to her keepers, Miss C was the oldest known sloth in the country.
• Have you ever heard about Buttercup the sloth? Chances are, if you were online in 2015, you witnessed her rise to Facebook fame, thanks to a man named Gerald Richardson. A volunteer at the Sloth Sanctuary in Costa Rica, Richardson took a photo of a sunbathing Buttercup and posted it on the social media site for all to see. Within 24 hours, about a million people had seen and shared it, making her possibly the most famous sloth in history. She became so famous, American Apparel asked to use her image on a shirt. Talk about taking the high road!