For more than a decade, animal rescue centers in Central America have reported receiving a strangely high number of baby sloths with genetic mutations. Dr. Rebecca Cliffe was working on her Ph.D. near San Clemente at the Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica when she first began noticing sloths with misshapen limbs, missing appendages and albinism.
“They were often missing fingers and toes, sometimes the entire lower arm would be missing, sometimes the entire limb. The ears and the jaws were very prone to being deformed,” Cliffe said in an interview with Salon. Besides sloths with genetic mutations that have been taken into rescue centers, many others have been spotted in the wild. “Here in the South Caribbean, we regularly see sloths with missing arms, missing fingers and toes, still living in the wild, some of them as adults thriving,” Cliffe said.
