Feeding and Digestion
At night, sloths eat leaves, shoots, and fruit from the trees and get almost all of their water from juicy plants. Sloths often descend from trees to defecate. Sloth digestive processes work very slowly, because their food is difficult to process, and because their body temperatures fluctuate every day. Sloths are adapted to problems of leaf digestion in a variety of ways:
- Their stomach has complex pouches that are good for storing bulky food. The pouches separate batches of food that are in different stages of digestion and fermentation by bacteria. Three-toes have more complex stomachs than two-toes. This makes sense because three-toes are obligatory folivores (can live on nothing else), while two-toes can live on various fruits, flowers, and buds, as well as leaves.
- Since leaves differ in digestibility, sloths may choose specific types. Active sloths swivel their heads to look around very carefully before deciding which leaves to approach for feeding. Female sloths that are pregnant or carrying a young one often choose to feed on leaves of Lacmellea panamensis, which is one of the most easily digestible to sloths. Pregnant sloths also prefer Cecropia eximia , but mainly in August through December. However, females with young do not very often use Cecropia, which is not as digestible as Lacmellea.
- To speed up their life processes, three-toed sloths in particular will hang out in the sun in the morning, exposing their bellies for deep body warming, and will often choose trees to sleep in that will give them good basking sites in the morning.