“The male, Terje, has pale fur around the face, while Tallina is dark,” says Daniel Johansson, animal keeper at Universeum.
Two sloths have moved in and proved a great hit among the monkeys and birds in the Rainforest Zone. They move really slowly, but are brilliantly adapted to life in the trees. With their long arms and legs ending in hooked claws, they move around easily, hanging from branches and vines.
From Norway to Sweden
The sloths come from a zoo in Norway and are about 20 years old. That’s middle-aged for a sloth, so they have many years ahead of them in Universeum’s vibrant rainforest.
The couple are a male called Tallina and a female called Terje, but they are more like friends than actual partners.
“In the wild, sloths usually live alone, although several females may occupy the same tree. Our rainforest has plenty of space for them both and they seem to like it here. They’ll now carry on exploring their new home and learning which rocks and branches are good for climbing,” explains Jan Westin, zoologist at Universeum.
Move slowly to save energy
Sloths mostly eat buds, young shoots, fruit, berries and leaves that are low in energy and difficult to digest. To deal with this, they have a large stomach with several chambers that slowly break the food down. It can take over a month to digest one meal!
A hammock for the monkeys
Universeum’s sloths know what they want on the menu:
“Tallina’s favourite is boiled carrots and Terje likes boiled potatoes. We might also see our monkeys taking an interest in their food. Other zoos have reported the monkeys sleeping on the stomachs of their sloths, where it’s warm and comfy. That might happen here too,” says animal keeper Daniel Johansson, who is responsible for the sloths at Universeum.
About the two-toed sloth (Choloepus didactylus)
Sloths are mammals of the order Pilosa, which is Latin for ‘hairy’.
They live in the Amazon and neighbouring mountain regions.
Sloths rely on their camouflage colours and slow movements to avoid predators. It is mainly big cats such as jaguars and ocelots that kill and eat sloths. However, the greatest threat is loss of habitat as humans clear areas of forest.
Sloths are mostly nocturnal and sleep for several hours a day. They only come down to the ground to change trees or to poop.
They only need to poop once every week or two weeks. This means that urine and excrement can make up as much as 30 percent of their body weight.
Terje hanging from a tree in the Rainforest Zone. One of the first things he did was have a bath in the pond below.
