Fantastic fungi found on sleepy sloths

Sloths are remarkable creatures. Their slow movements seem out of entirely out of place in South and Central American rainforests where fast and efficient predators like jaguars hunt the forest floor and birds of prey hunt from above. While during surveys in a 1-ha forest fragment I happened across a sloth skull. 

Here a National Geographic video of a sloth being taken a Harpy Eagle. 

I have only seen a single living sloth up close in the wild while it was crossing the road and many more as road kill along the highway that runs north from Manaus. Remarkably, I did see a sloth within the Manaus city limits moving about the Cecropia trees. 

A team of researchers published a recent paper in PLOS describing assays of ascomycetes (cup fungi) living on sloth fur and found species that were active against malaria (kills >500,000 people/year), Chagas disease, bacteria, and even cancer cells. They detected 82 operational taxonomic units (essentially species). Sloths are, essentially, their own biome with predators and symbionts, autotrophs and heterotrophs. 

Just in case the eagle video gets you down, here's some sloth cuteness

But, whatever you do, don't fall in love in a sloth