Scientists from the USA and Ecuador filmed how a slow sloth escaped from a hunting ocelot (a representative of the cat family) and then escaped. Description of the case published in the journal Food Webs.
The images were taken at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in the Ecuadorian Amazon. two-toed sloth (Choloepus didactylus) almost fell prey to the ocelot cat (leopard pardalis), but managed to dodge the hunter with a few quick blows and then fled across the log.
Sloths spend most of their lives in trees, occasionally descending to the ground at night, not during the day as in this case. Raids in the dark are safer because they can become easy prey for predators due to the slowness of the animals.
Study authors from the University of the Andes (Colombia), the University of Texas at Austin (USA) and the University of San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador) said the resulting images were incredibly rare.
Both two-toed sloths and ocelots are difficult animals to study: they make little noise and are excellent at hiding, so they are rarely observed in the wild. Also, ocelots have not been reported to hunt sloths before.
The researchers cannot say with certainty that the sloth managed to escape completely unharmed due to the camera trap’s limited field of view. However, they returned to the scene two days after the videos were shot and found no sign of the sloth.
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