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

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.

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.

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.