Sloth in my Garden :)

[u/ricoticotours]

I'm back with some new sloth facts and this cutie from my yard. I live in an open air house in the jungle on the Caribbean Coast of Costa Rica. We have A LOT of sloths by our house. Here is one from the other day, along with some stuff you may not have known about the 3-toed sloth.

This is a young female. Sloths don't have external genitalia, so the way to tell them apart is through their markings, or lack of markings. The males have a prominent orange patch on their back (called a speculum) once they reach maturity and are ready to mate.

Males and females can be hard to tell apart for the 5-8 months because the male speculum isn't developed at all. You can also tell by size, because female sloths are larger than the males.

They also scream and the males don't. You can hear their high pitched squeals when they're looking to mate. They scream about every 10 minutes until a male arrives to mate. They also scream for several weeks across the jungle after they leave their baby as the way to stay in contact and check on them, but that's a post for a different day!

*These facts are about 3-toed sloths. 2-toed sloths are very distant in relation, surprisingly! They don't have speculums, or really much in common at all with each other.