![]() "But what makes those males so sexy to the females?" "The females are exhibiting a somewhat strong mate choice," Pauli said. In a 2012 study in PLOS ONE, for instance, Pauli and Peery reported that a single male somehow sired half of all of the juveniles the researchers tested. ![]() Whatever the case, there does appear to be some kind of sexual selection, with females picking the best males, though what qualities they find desirable is not clear. "If there is courting behavior, we don't know," he said. But what happens when a pair meets up is anybody's guess. variegatus, a three-toed sloth, moving toward a calling female in the forests of Espirito Santo in southeastern Brazil, suggesting the female was actually trying to attract mates, Chiarello said. One of Chiarello's students once witnessed a male B. "This call is a loud 'eeeeeh' lasting more or less one second." "In some localities, local people from rural areas surrounded by large tracts of native forest frequently report hearing the 'whistlelike' call of maned sloths ( Bradypus torquatus) in certain times of the year," said biologist and sloth researcher Adriano Chiarello of the University of São Paulo in Brazil. Reports suggest that females will broadcast their willingness to mate with a kind of high-pitched scream. Just how the sloths get down to business within these ranges is not completely understood. However, male two-toed sloths' ranges can be up to an order of magnitude larger than their distant three-toed cousins.įemale two- and three-toed sloths also keep their own small home ranges, which often intersect with the home ranges of multiple males at the same time, according to recent research conducted by Pauli and his colleague Zach Peery. Male two-toed and three-toed sloths are largely solitary creatures that live in defined home ranges, which may overlap some. "It's fairly fixed on the calendar cycle," he said, adding that two-toed sloths, by comparison, have a "blurred reproductive schedule that happens year-round." Three-toed sloths have a kind of "birth pulse," Pauli said - females mate during the late summer and early fall, give birth early in the next year and then carry around their baby until the next mating season. When the sloths mate also appears to differ between the three-toed and two-toed varieties. Two-toed sloths, on the other hand, appear to have weak polygyny and strong female promiscuity. Three-toed sloths exhibit strong polygyny and weak female promiscuity, in which certain males are very reproductively successful, mating with many females and fathering the majority of offspring in a population.
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