José Pablo Guzmán García is our sloth scientist in charge of the Urban Sloth Project (USP)and is also involved in other research initiatives, such as the Great Sloth Census.

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

Trees, more trees. Ten, a hundred, a thousand, more?! The beginning of the Great Sloth Census (a different research project SloCo is conducting to study the population of sloths) is definitely not easy.

Hello, dear Sloth Community! The peak of summer and the rainy season has brought us big thunderstorms, flooding, and the high season for tourism in Costa Rica. Despite these challenges, we have continued with our usual work of planting trees and installing canopy bridges, spaying and neutering rescued dogs, and monitoring our sloths for the Urban Sloth Project.

The Osa Peninsula, located in the South Pacific area of Costa Rica, is one of the most biodiverse hotspots on the planet, containing 2.5% of global terrestrial biodiversity in just 1,200 km²! On social media, you can see footage of tour guides constantly spotting tapirs, monkeys, and even jaguars.

Tortuguero is one of the most unique places in Costa Rica. It’s a small village with no streets or cars, which makes sense, as there are no roads leading there.

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?

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

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.

We will never forget that stormy day in May 2021 when we found Mango on the ground outside of HQ, tiny and wet, and clearly out of her depth. Jim, our plushie sloth mascot, came to the rescue as Mango’s surrogate mother. Mango clung to Jim and almost immediately fell asleep.

In the South Caribbean of Costa Rica, it is pretty common to find sloths in unusual places: on a restaurant cutlery shelf, a hotel ladder, a fruit stand, clinging to a truck… you name it, sloths have been there. World-renowned wildlife photographer Suzi Eszterhas came to the South Caribbean to take eye-opening photographs of the lives of these sloths in urbanized areas.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, when the world takes a moment to step back and commemorate the achievements, and activism of women. 

“Oh my gosh,” says my boss, holding the binoculars to her face. “I think Croissant is a boy.” I take my eyes off the beeping box attached to our portable radio antenna and peer into the trees, trying to find the small, tan-colored sloth amongst the palm fronts and tree bark. Boy or girl, I personally think Croissant might actually be a coconut, but I defer to Amelia’s experience.

Cliffe, R.N. and Haupt, R.J., 2018. Hanging out for a drink. Frontiers in Ecology & the Environment, 16(8).