Sloth Bear Cub Naming
Name the sloth bear cub!
There is an unbearably cute addition at Susie’s Bear Hollow! A female sloth bear cub was born at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo on December 22, 2024, to mom, Shiva, and dad, Balawat. Mom and cub are doing well and spending their time bonding in a dedicated maternity den until the weather warms up.
The cub weighed around 1 pound at birth and currently weighs around 8.5 pounds. Born relatively immobile and with eyes and ears closed, sloth bear cubs are entirely dependent on their mother. They begin learning to walk between one and two months of age, but hitching a ride on their mom’s back is one of their favorite ways to travel until around nine months. This is a unique behavior not commonly seen in other bear species – and that shaggy fur comes in handy as the cubs cling on!
Help name Cleveland Metroparks Zoo’s sloth bear cub and support sloth bear conservation. Make a donation of any amount for the name of your choice. The name with the largest donation total by midnight on March 25, 2025, will determine the cub’s name.
Each of these names are culturally significant to communities in sloth bears’ wild habitat range.
Kamali
Sahana
Suhani
Donations made during this campaign will help protect wild sloth bears through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) SAFE Sloth Bear program. Specifically, funds will support the IUCN Bear Specialist Group’s sloth bear range mapping project, which helps scientists better understand bear distribution to improve conservation efforts. The model used to conduct this habitat mapping was initially created by Cleveland Metroparks Zoo’s Andean Bear Conservation Alliance to study Andean bears, and is now being used to advance sloth bear conservation as well!
Sloth bears are threatened by habitat loss and human-wildlife coexistence issues in their wild habitats of India and Sri Lanka and are currently listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
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