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.

February flew by in a blur of new sloths, record-breaking census days, and even a little Italian TV fame! But before we dive headfirst into March, let’s take a moment to look back at all the jungle excitement.

Occasionally, sloths have been known to give birth to twins. Since there is only enough room on the female’s chest for one baby, and the sloth’s very slow metabolism only provides enough resources for one,  the weakest twin will usually be rejected and abandoned.

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?

Nacho, a feisty Hoffmann’s two-fingered Sloth, joined the Urban Sloth Project in May 2021. Nacho was one of the most interesting sloths we monitored during the months he was part of the project.

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, something truly extraordinary happened in the South Caribbean of Costa Rica: a three-fingered sloth baby with leucism was spotted! This is the first case ever recorded of its kind.

Contrary to the news reports, the virus in question, referred to as a “sloth virus,” is not exclusive to sloths.

Sloths are divided into two large groups: Bradypus, the three-fingered sloths that include the famous smiley and masked-face sloths, and Choloepus, the brownish ones with a pig-like nose and two fingers on each hand.

Occasionally, sloths have been known to give birth to twins. Since there is only enough room on the female’s chest for one baby, and the sloth’s very slow metabolism only provides enough resources for one,  the weakest twin will usually be rejected and abandoned.

Cliffe, R.N., Haupt, R.J., Kennedy, S., Felton, C., Williams, H.J., Avey-Arroyo, J. and Wilson, R., 2023. The behaviour and activity budgets of two sympatric sloths; Bradypus variegatus and Choloepus hoffmanni. PeerJ, 11, p.e15430.

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.

Welcome to the fifth Tales from the Jungle of the year – and this one’s packed. Some of it is good news. Some of it… let’s just say it builds character.

It’s hard to believe we’re already heading into the fifth month of the year—while sloths may be slow, time certainly isn’t!

Sloths and pandas are two beloved, yet vastly different animals from opposite sides of the world. Their uniqueness has captured the hearts of many, and their distinct appearance and quirky behavior have become symbols of nature’s diversity and resilience. Sloths are known for their slow pace and leisurely, arboreal lifestyle, while pandas are recognized for their black and white coats, clumsiness, and love for bamboo.

The rainforests of Central and South America are home to some of the most fascinating creatures on Earth, including sloths and howler monkeys.

In the wild, some animals are just delightfully strange, which is the case with sloths and wombats. Sloths, with their slow lifestyles, seeming to live in a world where time barely exists, while wombats, with their chunky bodies and burrowing skills, are underground architects of the wild. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at these quirky critters and see what makes them so fascinating and special.

The slow loris, or ‘loris perezoso’ in Spanish (literally ‘sloth loris’), is a fascinating creature. Despite living on the opposite side of the world from sloths, they share many similarities.

Finally, sloth bears! We seized the opportunity to compare sloths and sloth bears to clarify the confusion surrounding their common names and delve into their lifestyles, the threats they face, and ways we can help in their conservation!

Sloths and Sea Turtles couldn’t be more different animals. One is a furry mammal, and the other is an aquatic reptile. However, these two have more in common than we could think!

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.

While strolling back from the beach one afternoon, I noticed a bunch of people standing by the side of the road, their necks craned upwards towards a tree that they were staring at intently. 

“July was my first serious month of volunteering, as I was still learning in June. I enjoyed feeling more confident in my sloth-tracking abilities and becoming more familiar with the area.

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).

“Ow! Ow, ow ow owwwwch!” I crouch down and hold my head in my hands, my skull still ringing with the impact. I feel as though I’ve been clonked with a falling coconut, or perhaps a rogue meteorite, though on some level I know that if this were the case I’d be far less conscious right now.

We’re thrilled to share that SloCo’s work, featuring Dr. Rebecca Cliffe and our Project Manager Tamara, is highlighted in the latest episode of In Her Nature, a PBS documentary series.

Gregarious animals, or animals that live in groups, often have unique collective nouns to refer to them. For example, a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance, while a group of owls is known as a parliament. You may have also heard of a conspiracy of ravens or a murder of crows. But what about sloths?

If you’ve been following our work for a while, you already know that finding sloths in the most unnatural places here in the South Caribbean is something we encounter almost every day. While it may seem delightful for tourists and appear ‘picturesque’ to see a sloth above a restaurant’s dinner table, it highlights the serious issue of urbanization encroaching on sloth habitats.

On July 25, the founder and executive director of The Sloth Conservation Foundation, Dr. Rebecca Cliffe, was awarded the honorary title of ‘Doctor of Science’ by Swansea University in Wales, in recognition of her groundbreaking work in research and conservation.

Young people always talk about what they want to be when they are older. Maybe they want to be a journalist, a baker, a dentist, or even a boss of a huge company. There are so many options!

February is the perfect time to celebrate love, and also love to sloths. It’s Sloth Love Month! You might wonder, do sloths love?

These two sloths are not only different species, but they belong to two completely different families, separated by over 30 million years of evolution. Cross-species adoptions like this are incredibly rare in the wild, with only 3 other documented observations of this happening.

It’s April 22nd, Earth Day, although we believe all days are Earth Day. We don’t want to write another blog about the importance of having a livable planet.

We venture outside to work on our field projects daily, armed with binoculars, necessary equipment, and appropriate clothing (especially during the rainy season).

#GivingTuesday was created in 2012 and aims to be an antidote to consumer culture by celebrating generosity and inspiring people to bring about change in their communities and the world. It’s a chance to promote causes you believe in, and the one day of the year when non-profit organizations and charities get a chance to take center stage.

Deforestation to make way for cattle farming is a problem growing as exponentially as the human population. Cows make a lot of methane as part of their digestion process, and so instead of forests full of trees making breathable oxygen, you get feedlots full of cattle making greenhouse gasses.

To expand into new territories and look for mates or food. It isn’t hard to imagine why animals need to move around, but when you work in conservation, the more interesting question is: how?

What 35 million years of evolution reveal about resilience, extinction, and the role of humans.

In a recently published investigation called “Pre–Younger Dryas megafaunal extirpation at Rancho La Brea linked to fire-driven state shift,” Frank O’Keefe from Marshall University and his research team unfold the factors behind the disappearance of enormous prehistoric creatures in Southern California.

Researchers have discovered the remains of a specimen of Thalassocnus, a marine sloth found for the first time in a continental environment in Northern Argentina. This discovery significantly expands the geographic distribution of this lineage of fossil sloths.

For a chance to picture what the prehistoric Shasta ground sloth may have looked like, virtual and augmented reality may be our best bet. Ice Age giants such as mammoths, mastodons, giant beavers, saber-toothed cats, and dire wolves once roamed the American continent with giant ground sloths. But around 10,000 years ago, after the end of the last Ice Age, America’s impressive megafauna went extinct.

In the Amazon rainforests in the country of Colombia, there is a place called Serranía La Lindosa, with rock cliffs decorated in ancient drawings. There are thousands of paintings covering 12 kilometers (8 miles) of rock in an area that has been largely inaccessible.

Sloths these days are small, tree-dwelling animals that live high up in the rainforest canopy and do a good imitation of the plants they eat. They’re slow, they’re green, and they can’t jump—but a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports suggests their ancestors weren’t the strict vegetarians their reputation would have us believe.

Today we celebrate books! April 23rd is International Book Day, in honor of two of the most important writers in history: William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes.

To celebrate the International Day of Human Spaceflight, held every April 12th, we're reaching for the stars with a little help from one of our most stellar supporters: Ponder E. Stine.

Well, since these illustrations date from the 1700s to the 1800s, they technically represent ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘Victorian’ sloths, as those are the historical periods often associated with these centuries. But let’s not get too scientific for the sake of a good old-fashioned meme!

Although often referred to as two-toed sloths, this description can be a bit misleading since all sloths have three toes on their hind limbs. The real difference lies in their forelimbs, where sloths in the Choloepus genus have two fingers.

The definitive quiz and trivia for sloth experts! This time, we have the three-fingered sloth edition to celebrate the Bradypus genus. Don’t be fooled by the first question—it’s just an easy one to get you warmed up!

Ur-Song Music is proud to donate “You Call Me Slow (The Sloth Song)” to SloCo. It’s a lighthearted, Broadway-style ballad that invites listeners to slow down and enjoy grooving at the speed of sloth.

Puerto Viejo de Talamanca: the beach town where the dress code is a bathing suit and flip-flops and no one is in a rush to go anywhere. It has more than paradise beaches, and in this list, we’ve selected for you the very best things to do in our little corner of the South Caribbean. Trust us, we did them all!

“Limón has its own identity,” said Markus Brown, whose family has lived in Punta Uva, one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, for more than a century.

Responsible travel is not only caring about nature and the ecosystem, it is about being socially and culturally aware, understanding and respecting different cultures, customs, and traditions. It is about always trying to have a positive impact and minimize the negative impact as much as possible.

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.

In the Amazon rainforests in the country of Colombia, there is a place called Serranía La Lindosa, with rock cliffs decorated in ancient drawings. There are thousands of paintings covering 12 kilometers (8 miles) of rock in an area that has been largely inaccessible.