Animal Junction

Joe Fortunato, aka Jungle Joe Pet Detective, who saw the need for a professional wildlife education service in southeastern Pennsylvania that was fun, educational and affordable. In 2005, Joe decided to trade his long and prosperous career as a police officer for his dream of turning a lifelong hobby into an educational experience for people of all ages to enjoy. He is now sworn to "protect and preserve." Joe began his career as a Philadelphia police officer in 1989 after graduating second in his police academy class. He was assigned to the 22nd and 35th Districts, where he was filmed by the infamous television series "COPS."

Animal Junction is a traveling wildlife education company founded by zookeeper and wildlife educator, Joe Fortunato. They introduce children and adults to the fascinating world of exotic animals by providing zoology enrichment programs. Animal Junction enjoys the challenge of combining entertainment with education, thus providing an "edutainment" experience.

Sloths are medium-sized mammals that live in Central and South America belonging to the families Megalonychidae and Bradypodidae, part of the order Pilosa. Most scientists call these two families the Folivora suborder, while some call it Phyllophaga. Sloths are omnivores. They may eat insects, small lizards and carrion, but their diet consists mostly of buds, tender shoots, and leaves. Sloths have made extraordinary adaptations to an arboreal browsing lifestyle. Leaves, their main food source, provide very little energy or nutrition and do not digest easily: sloths have very large, specialized, slow-acting stomachs with multiple compartments in which symbiotic bacteria break down the tough leaves. As much as two-thirds of a well-fed sloth's body-weight consists of the contents of its stomach, and the digestive process can take as long as a month or more to complete. Even so, leaves provide little energy, and sloths deal with this by a range of economy measures: they have very low metabolic rates (less than half of that expected for a creature of their size), and maintain low body temperatures when active (30 to 34 degrees Celsius or 86 to 93 degrees Fahrenheit), and still lower temperatures when resting. Sloths mainly live in Cecropia trees.

Sloths move only when necessary and even then very slowly: they have about half as much muscle tissue as other animals of similar weight. They can move at a marginally higher speed if they are in immediate danger from a predator (4.5 m / 15 feet per minute), but they burn large amounts of energy doing so. Their specialized hands and feet have long, curved claws to allow them to hang upside-down from branches without effort. While they sometimes sit on top of branches, they usually eat, sleep, and even give birth hanging from limbs. They sometimes remain hanging from branches after death. On the ground their maximum speed is 1.5 m / 5 feet per minute. They mostly move at 15-30 cm (0.5-1 feet) per minute.