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Sloths are notorious for being slow, traveling a mere 0.03 kilometers (120 feet) each day. These live high up in the trees of Central and South American forests. Their slow movements may not make them that exciting to watch, but if you're a scientist who is studying them, that slowness is a big plus.
"They're actually a great study animal for the wild because you can collect a lot of data on them," says Giles Duffield. He is a biologist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
A few years back, Duffield studied birds in Bolivia, but it was a lot harder to study a bird than a sloth. "You'd see some parrots and you'd make some notes and then they were gone and you wouldn't see them again for another 24 hours," he says.
Duffield and his colleagues now collect data on the brown-throated three-toed sloths that live in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. In June 2020, Duffield reported his work studying sloths and their circadian rhythms. These are the 24 hour schedules that control the sleeping and eating patterns of animals.
A Lot Of Rest
Brown-throated three-toed sloths can stay in sight—or even in the same tree—for nearly 24 hours. They rest anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of the time, allowing scientists like Duffield to closely observe sloths in their habitat, or natural environment where it lives.
Older studies on sloths suggested that sloths could be nocturnal, which means they are active during the night and sleep during the day. Other studies showed they had no set activity pattern of waking and sleeping at all: they are active at any time during their 24-hour cycle, night or day, without any issues.
Duffield and his team, on the other hand, found that their sloths were mostly diurnal, meaning they're active during the day and sleep during the night. "So this was kind of the opposite to what we'd expected," he says.
The scientists wanted to find out why their results were so different from the conclusions that previous scientists made. One possibility is that Duffield's study was unique because the team observed the sloths over complete 24-hour cycles. They monitored the sloths this way for 29 days, providing a clearer picture of sloth behavior.
There's another difference between Duffield's work and previous research: the habitats the sloths lived in. The brown-throated three-toed sloths lived in habitats disturbed by humans, while other sloths were in undisturbed habitats.
Damaged Ecosystems
The sloth's Atlantic Forest home is in trouble, with an estimated 98 percent of its woodland being lost. The forest has been highly disturbed by humans, who have hunted its animals, cleared its trees, built many roads, and developed the land. This means that a lot of the animals and plants that once lived there are gone. The sloth's predators, the animals that would eat the sloths for food, are gone too.
Sloths may have been nocturnal to improve their chances of survival in a more challenging environment. But Duffield thinks that because their predators in the Atlantic Forest are now extinct, sloths don't have to compete with other species for food. The animals can find enough food to live during the daytime instead of mostly at night. The switch between nighttime and daytime behaviors could be the way sloths handle a damaged ecosystem. These are biological communities made up of plants, animals, and microorganisms.
"A lot of organisms can't readily change their day to night activity," he says. "Their survival strategy requires one or the other." So it may well be that change, or that association with daytime as opposed to nighttime, or not having a set activity pattern, does change some of the organisms associated with the sloth. For example, algae and insects find homes in sloth fur.
"That's something we'd love to examine," Duffield says. For this new research, Duffield's most important piece of equipment is perhaps a comfortable chair.
