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.

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.

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.

One would think that due to sloths’ famously slow lifestyle, observing them in the wild would not be a hard task. However, their slow lifestyle (a consequence of having the slowest metabolism of any land mammal) has resulted in the evolutionary aim of being nearly undetectable in the trees to avoid predation from Jaguars and Harpy Eagles.