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.

Sloths in the wild learn everything from their mother: where to sleep, what to eat, and even when it’s time to climb down the tree to defecate.

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.

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.

Hello! I’m Faith, a student from the UK, currently doing a 12-month research placement with the Sloth Conservation Foundation working towards my degree in Zoology. Believe it or not I came across SloCo while online shopping. I was looking at a sustainable clothing brand that donates to several wildlife charities to aid conservation efforts, one of them being SloCo.

I have been working as a researcher for SloCo for only 7 months. The time has passed extremely fast, and still, I have learned incredible things that can only be taught in the field, working with people face to face and always improving my skills, not only my knowledge as a scientist but improving my second language which is English (people say I can speak good but I know I can get better at it).

The Urban Sloth Project is a research aiming to study how habitat disturbance in urbanized areas of the South Caribbean of Costa Rica is affecting the behavior and ecology of wild sloths. The project is entering its 4th year, and surely, monitoring sloths is never a boring task.

The sea breeze is a welcome relief as we crest the final switchback and come out on top of the cliff. I take off my hat and let the wind run through my hair. It’s too hot to dry us out much, but the view from up here is my favorite in all of Puerto Viejo: the seething white and blue waves beneath us, the mist-shrouded distant horizon, and the sunlit local Cocles Island.

Baguette was the third three-fingered sloth collared for the Urban Sloth Project and was a rather spontaneous addition to the project. She was found while Suzi Eszterhas (World-renowned photographer and SloCo trustee) was visiting Puerto Viejo to document the plight of urban sloths.

I stare at the spider hanging in front of my face. It is huge, blue and black and yellow, hanging from a golden web longer than my bicycle and better constructed than my house. It stares back at me.

I’m standing amongst the wreckage of felled trees and bulldozed undergrowth, my boots crunching on dead vegetation, but I’m not looking down.

“Dear Santa, This year I have been extremely very mostly good, and for Christmas, I would really like for a sloth to go poop.”