Hanging out in the Zoo Atlanta sloth cam chatroom

Sweet dreams, sweet Sloth

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  • Animal Planet
  • Idle threats to mankind

Creative Loafing last week gave you some spectacular people to watch. Susan Pavlin and her work at Global Growers is important and vital and makes Atlanta a richer place. The first time I ever ate at Allen Suh’s Gato Arigato, he was experimenting with gold leaf. It was like eating a Trinidad James song. So please, watch them!

But then turn your eyes to 1s and 0s to Zoo Atlanta’s Sloth Cam, a rich melange of one of nature’s weirdest animals and the internet’s weirdest people.

The 24/7 live feed launched last October in tandem with the Animal Planet show “Meet the Sloths,” and the feed shows the exploits of male sloth Cocoa and his two female roommates Bonnie and Okra. It’s like “Three’s Company” if nobody did anything.

Even though sloths are legit weird and fascinating - They only poop once a week! It makes them lose a third of their body weight! - the optics of that weirdness aren’t action-packed. Mostly they sleep and hang from things. “It’s all the drama without the heart-stopping speed,” a copywriter was paid to write about the Sloth Cam.

The camera is tightly framed on a corner of the sloth enclosure, which, like our hearts, sometimes features one or two sloths but is just as often empty. At night, they’re backlit interrogation-room harshly and scored by an ambient hum. The only clue that you aren’t watching a still image is the barely perceptible expansion of sloth ribcage.

So turn your gaze toward the Sloth Cam’s chat functionality. At 10:38 p.m. on Nov. 13, 13 people were watching a wad of sloth pulsate in a cage in Grant Park. One of those people, username “Lipwhiskers,” gushes:

lol the Sloth’s could care less about the Monkeys and bugs and big flying insects.
Hello pretty sloth nice to see you awake

There are people in the world who love sloths, who want to watch them 24/7, who believe sloths can read messages in Animal Planet chat rooms. “Lipwhiskers” continues:

lol the Sloth’s could care less about the Monkeys and bugs and big flying insects.
Hello pretty sloth nice to see you awake
Looks like a hard day at work. Beautiful sloth

“what kinda name is lipwhiskers,” “mattypeachblossom” asks.

“Wdewdrop1” is disappointed in the Sloth Cam’s camera angles. A lot of commenters seem concerned with whether or not the barely moving sloths are even alive. A chat user named “slothjunkie” has lots of great alternate sloth musical act names:

david lee sloth
david hasselsloth
milli vasloth

Watching the people who watch the sloth cam is arguably much weirder than watching the sloth cam itself, but it’s just as fascinating, and just as much of a glimpse into a separate world. Take it away, “lipwhiskers!”

So cute sharing such a small place
They are so cute you just want to hug them like a little baby
Sweet dreams sweet Sloth

And sweet dreams, sweet sloth watchers.