Sloths in Costa Rica

Try coziness

Everybody loves sloths. There is hardly a person who doesn’t love sloths… at least we don’t know any. Everyone who flies to Costa Rica wants to see at least one sloth, and the best way to do that is to travel with a guide. Finding a sloth is not difficult because they are quite lazy, so if you know the animals’ favorite trees just look around.

Is the sloth really lazy?

That probably depends on the point of view, because we humans often think of slowness as laziness. When the sloth was discovered by researchers, they noticed relatively quickly that the sloth moves very slowly and most of the time even hangs almost motionless in the tree. So the assumption is that these animals are relatively boring. Yes, it is true sloths sleep most of the day, up to 20 hours a day. This means that a 40-year-old sloth sleeps through almost 34 years of its life. If people only lived to be 40 years old, we would only spend around 13 years of our lives sleeping. Sloths nowadays spend almost all their lives in the trees unlike their larger heavier ancestors more than 10,000 years ago who spent most of their time on the ground. However, they are well equipped for this. In order to move and hold on in the dense canopy of Costa Rica, sloths have 4 inch long curved claws. They usually hang upside down in the trees to sleep, eat, mate and give birth to their young. They only leave the safe branches to do their business every 1-2 weeks or to change trees. Once the animals are on the ground, they can only move very clumsily. They pull themselves forward with their front arms and simply drag the rest of their body, similar to how toddlers move around when they can’t crawl yet. You might think that these slow animals, weighing about 5 kilos, would simply sink in the water, but that’s not the case – sloths are actually quite good swimmers and every now and then they simply drop into the water from a branch.

Sloths and their peculiarities

Sloths high up in the trees are almost perfectly camouflaged. Not only because they cling to a branch completely motionless most of the time, but also because they carry around a small mini biotope with them. Small moths, beetles and many other insects live in their fur. Even algae grows on it which gives the fur a greenish color and makes the sloths almost invisible in the green jungle. Should they be spotted by a bird of prey or a cat of prey such as the jaguar, they will defend themselves by any means necessary. Their sharp claws and teeth are good weapons.

In addition, the sloth has an extremely good wound healing ability, so even severe injuries heal completely within a few weeks. Sloths have other amazing benefits that make life easier for them in Costa Rica’s rainforests. Their crest, for example, is not on their head or back like many other animals, but on their belly. This allows the rainwater coming from above to run off perfectly and the sloth does not get wet. Another advantage is one to three additional cervical vertebrae, which allow optimal freedom of movement. In this way, the animals can get to almost all the leaves and fruit around them without having to move too much. Sloths are anything but boring and are almost perfectly adapted to their environment through sometimes bizarre ways.

Three fingers or just two?

There are two types of sloths in Costa Rica, the two-toed sloth and the three-toed sloth. In terms of appearance and their way of life the animals differ only in that they have either three fingers or two fingers on their hands. The misleading term two or three-toed sloth is also often used. This terminology is wrong insofar as both the two-toed and the three-toed sloth have three toes.

Where can the sloths be spotted?

The sloth’s range is in almost all of Costa Rica so the chances of seeing sloths are quite high if you know which trees they live on. On almost all of our tours there is a possibility to see a sloth. Especially in the Ecocentro Danaus and often on the way to Caño Negro or Tortuguero.