If there’s one thing fieldwork teaches you, it’s that nothing ever goes entirely to plan, and that’s exactly what makes it exciting.

We don’t know how many sloths there are.
We don’t even know how many there should be.
And that’s a problem.

Vanderhoeven, E.A., Florida, M., Cliffe, R.N., Guzmán, J., Notarnicola, J. and Kartzinel, T.R., 2025. Host specificity of gastrointestinal parasites in free-ranging sloths from Costa Rica. PeerJ, 13, p.e19408.

Last week, we went to the primary forests in search of new sloths to collar and monitor for the Urban Sloth Project.

Tender is no ordinary sloth. He’s a young, sweet explorer living near a beach bar in Costa Rica’s South Caribbean. But his story starts with someone equally extraordinary: his mother, Tiki.

Cliffe, R.N., Ewart, H.E., Scantlebury, D.M., Kennedy, S., Avey-Arroyo, J., Mindich, D. and Wilson, R.P., 2024. Sloth metabolism may make survival untenable under climate change scenarios. PeerJ, 12, p.e18168.

Studying the GPS locations of an animal that doesn’t move much is challenging compared to studying species that travel a lot, such as whales and cheetahs. When studying sloths, accuracy is what we need to focus on.

Social media is filled with photos and videos of people holding sloths (or other wildlife), and we are investigating the reasons behind this behavior, as well as public perceptions and experiences regarding encounters with sloths.

This lovely pair was discovered in the beautiful garden of a local resort.   The owner contacted Dr. Cliffe, founder and executive director of The Sloth Conservation Foundation.

Many locals in the beach town of Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, where the Sloth Conservation Foundation is located, help Dr. Rebecca Cliffe and her team by alerting her when they find a sloth.

Back in June 2023, we ventured into the lush rainforest of La Selva Biological Station and Reserve to fit GPS collars on three sloths there: George, Misty, and Selvina.

What a year, huh?! Everything happened in 2023 for the Urban Sloth Project (USP)! We upgraded our technology by saying goodbye to our sloth backpacks and embracing collars with Daily Diaries Data Loggers and GPS trackers.

Habitat surveys are an essential part of the Urban Sloth Project (USP). In these surveys, we make eight squares, each 100 square meters, in the areas where sloths live. We collect GPS locations of the sloths and study the trees in these squares.

Are sloths drinking more water than before? Is the smoke from cars affecting the delicate micro-ecosystems of green algae and moths that sloths have in their fur? Are sloths affected by artificial lights?

On Saturday, 14 October, parts of the western hemisphere, including our little corner of the South Caribbean,  will experience a breathtaking celestial show: an annular solar eclipse.

The Maned Sloth, also known as Bradypus torquatus, indigenous to the Atlantic coastal rainforest of Brazil, are threatened by human interference, hunting activities, deforestation, and habitat loss, as well as climate change that affect their behavior.

Our team of researchers spent three days at La Selva Biological Station and Reserve at the end of August. There, they tried downloading the data from the GPS collar we fitted on Misty, George, and Selvina.

We are entering the next phase of the Urban Sloth Project! The aim of the Urban Sloth Project (USP) is to understand how urbanization and habitat disturbance are affecting the lives of sloths and their ecology.

Luna made an unexpected entrance into the Urban Sloth Project (USP) in March 2021, accompanied by her first baby, Sol.

The SloCo team visited  La Selva Biological Station and Reserve to place GPS collars on the sloths that live there.