In Sri Lanka, however, there is no seasonality to sloth bear breeding. In India, sloth bears breed in late spring to early summer.
They also receive treats as enrichment, such as mealworms, crickets, nuts, coconut and honey. At the Zoo, they are offered food at least three times daily: a large morning meal, a large evening meal and one or more snacks throughout the day.
#SLOTH SKELETON PLUS#
The Smithsonian's National Zoo's sloth bears eat a dry-food mixture designed for omnivores, plus fruits and vegetables, such as apples, sweet potatoes and grapes. During food shortages, sloth bears will eat carrion. Beetles, grubs and other insects round out their diet. Sloth bears climb trees and knock down honeycombs, later collecting the honey from the forest floor. During non-fruiting season, insects constitute 95 percent of a sloth bear's diet. Termites, dug out of their cement-hard nest mounds, and some ants are year-round staples. When trees are in fruit, usually during the monsoon season, sloth bears dine on mango, fig, ebony and other fruits, as well as on flowers. Time and additional specimens eventually revealed the true taxonomic relationships, but the confusing common name remains.Īs animals who consume termites and ants, sloth bears are considered myrmecophagous. At the time, Shaw thought that the bear was related to a sloth. Bradypus is also the genus of three species of sloth. He called it Ursine bradypus, ursine meaning bearlike and bradypus meaning slow foot. The first valid scientific description of this species was by George Shaw in 1791. It is thought that their feet are turned inward to increase digging efficiency. Due to their diet of insects and fruit, their premolars and molars are smaller than those of other bears, but they have large canines to use for defense. They have a keen sense of smell, as well as near-sight similar to that of humans.Īdult sloth bears are missing their top two front teeth (incisors), which enables them to suck up termites and other insects with ease. Sloth bears' nostrils can close completely, protecting the animals from dust or insects when raiding termite nests or beehives. Their shaggy fur does not have an undercoat, so it keeps them relatively cool in their native, warm climate and protects them from tropical insects. A cream-colored “V” or “Y” shape usually marks their chests. Unlike other large sloths, which had four fingers including two or three claws, this sloth had five fingers and four claws, evidence of a primitive stage of development, Webb said.Sloth bears have shaggy, dusty-black coats pale, short-haired muzzles and long, curved claws which they use to excavate termites and ants. Their findings were published as a 20-page paper in the December issue of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London.Įvidence of similar creatures has been found in South America, which makes researchers suspect that Florida's sloth could have migrated across the Panamanian land bridge.
Castor Cartelle, a zoologist from the University of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, and Gerardo De Iuliis, a zoologist from the University of Toronto in Canada, studied the bones for a decade before concluding this was a new, huge find. In 1989, Webb invited two of the world's leading specialists on such animals to examine the bones. Over the years a dozen of the sloths have been found at the same site, some with fully articulated skeletons, Webb said. The bones were found by a geology student in 1986, in a limestone quarry west of Gainesville. "This is a great, wonderful animal unlike anything in existence, whose huge size is almost reminiscent of the dinosaurs," Webb said. They used enormous claws to strip leaves from branches up to 20 feet long, Webb said, and entwine them in their long tongues.
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