Miller holds a MFA in jewelry and metalsmithing from East Carolina University.Įxecutive Director Center for Amazonia Scientific Innovation In 2018 she co-launched Better Without Mercury / Mejor Sin Mercurio, a mercury cleanup and site restoration project at the Gualconda gold mine in Colombia with the mine manager, Rolberto Alvarez. Miller Sustainable Jewelry Consulting and provides strategy, guidance, and impact measurement services to clients including jewelry brands and not-for-profits.Īs co-founder and former director of Ethical Metalsmiths, Miller worked to create a community of individuals committed to responsible materials sourcing by raising awareness of problems needing attention and working to address them. Miller is the founder and lead consultant of Christina T. First trained as an artist, she brings creative problem solving to her work on gold supply chains, jewelry, and community organizing for Amazon Aid Foundation. Ĭhristina T Miller is a sustainable jewelry specialist who encourages leadership in positive social change and environmental protection. Algae aren’t the only opportunists taking up residence in sloths – recent research has discovered that a number of fungi inhabiting sloths have disease-fighting properties. They foster a symbiotic relationship with a species of algae found only on sloths and nowhere else ! The relationship is beneficial to both: the algae gains shelter and water in the sloth’s hair, while providing the sloth with camouflage, protecting it from predators. Sloths are integral components of the Amazon rainforest. Lack of forest cover deprives them of their food source and renders them defenseless against predation on open ground – sloths are not agile on land and would be easy prey for jaguars and other big cats. Deforestation and habitat fragmentation threaten sloths like all other Amazonian creatures. Though the conservation status of both species of three-toed sloths in the Amazon are currently listed as ‘Least Concern’ by the IUCN, they do face threats such as capture by humans for illicit pet trade, and they are also hunted to be sold as food and medicine. What first may appear to be a lazy lifestyle is actually a successful evolutionary adaptation: sloths are morphologically and physiologically specialized to live in the high canopy and consume foods low in nutritional value that many other mammals would not be able to thrive on. Given their diet, it is not surprising sloths have an incredibly slow metabolism and low percent muscle mass compared to other mammals. To aid in the breakdown of such tough material, they have four-part stomachs and highly specialized gut bacteria, similar to digestive systems in other ruminants such as domestic cattle. Sloths are folivores, meaning they exclusively consume leaves, twigs and buds, and eat the leaves of close to 30 different tree and liana (woody vines) species. However, it is true that sloths are among the slowest-moving mammals in the world, moving on average only about half the length of a football field (41 yards) per day. Rightly or wrongly, sloths have gained a reputation as the laziest members of the animal kingdom. In captivity they may sleep 15-20 hours a day, but in the wild they only sleep on average about 9.6 hours a day. They spend most of their time hanging from branches high up in the rainforest canopy, where they eat, sleep, mate and even give birth. Three-toed sloths inhabit forests of many types including cloud and lowland tropical forest in the Amazon, though they also occasionally reside in cacao plantations. Its range spans as far north as Honduras, through Central America and encompasses the entire Amazon rainforest and beyond to the eastern coast of Brazil in the Atlantic rainforest. The brown-throated sloth (Bradypus variegatus) is the most widely distributed three-toed sloth. There are four species of three-toed sloths, two of which are found in the Amazon rainforest. Its namesake is one of the seven deadly sins (sloth) and ‘three-toed’ refers to its three claws on each limb. The three-toed sloth is an arboreal mammal found throughout Central and South America.
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