Sloth bear cubs!
Bear-y exciting news 🐻🤎
— San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (@sandiegozoo) February 13, 2025
First-time mama Shala welcomed two sloth bear cubs in early December, and after several weeks bonding in their private den, the shaggy-haired sweethearts are making their debut. pic.twitter.com/1q3oSofOXF
First-time mama Shala welcomed two sloth bear cubs in early December, and after several weeks bonding in their private den, the shaggy-haired sweethearts are making their debut.
Sloth bears Melursus ursinus live in hot, dry grasslands and forests in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. They have distinctive chevron-shaped or U-shaped chest markings, a long muzzle (longer than that of other bears) with an elongated snout, lips that can form a tube shape, allowing them to feed by noisily suctioning ants and termites right out of their nest mounds, nostrils that they can close when feeding on termites and ants (to avoid inhaling dirt), and prominent ears covered in long hair.
Sloth bears’ upper incisor teeth are effectively missing, which helps them to more easily vacuum up insects. In the wild, most of a sloth bear’s diet consists of ants and termites, although they also eat fruit, vegetation, flowers, honey, sugarcane, and sometimes grubs, eggs, and carrion. In their native habitats, sloth bears play an important role in their environment, reseeding forests and grassland areas by distributing seeds they eat, in their scat.
The San Diego Zoo has a long history with sloth bears, first welcoming two Indian sloth bears in 1940, and later, in 1979, becoming the first Zoo in North America to exhibit Sri Lankan sloth bears. The first Sri Lankan sloth bear cub ever born and raised in the Western Hemisphere was born at the Zoo in 1985, and many other sloth bears have called the Zoo home in the more recent past, including a bear named Kenny, who could imitate one of the keepers making a “raspberry” sound as a greeting.
