non-leaf items (e.g. fruits, flowers and animal matter)
and possessing large home ranges; the three-toed sloth is
considered more specialized, foraging on only leaves from
a small number of tree species to the point that individuals
appear capable of surviving on a single or a few tree
species (Chiarello2008,Gilmore et al.2001,Montgomery
& Sunquist 1975, 1978; Pauli et al. 2014). Both twoand
three-toed sloths use shade-grown agro-ecosystems
(Vaughan et al. 2007) but in one well-studied system,
only the two-toed sloth appears capable of maintaining
self-sustaining populations in such habitats, while the
three-toed sloth is only viable in the face of immigration
from surrounding areas (Peery & Pauli 2014).
Herein, we determined resource use and overlap for
syntopic populations of two- (C. hoffmanni) and threetoed
sloth (B. variegatus) in the same shade-grown
agro-ecosystem where viability analyses were conducted
(Peery & Pauli 2014) to explore whether greater habitat
and resource specialization by the three-toed sloth could
be contributing to its relatively low viability in this
altered landscape (Peery & Pauli 2014). Specifically, we
quantified tree use and macro-habitat selection for both
two- and three-toed sloths across a range of different
habitats presentwithin the agro-ecosystem.We predicted
that diversity of tree species used would be greatest in
tropical forests, intermediate in shade-grown cocoa, and
lowest in pasture for both species and that the three-toed
sloth would exhibit stronger selection for patches of intact
forest and greater avoidance of cattle pastures than the
two-toed sloth.