If you are traveling today, please be advised to take extreme caution. We have a large amount of flooding happening in several areas, including Limon.
Please check your routes, and if you can delay your travel or avoid Route 32 and Route 10, please do!
Safe travels everyone!
Just wanted to share this cutie from our garden yesterday. I usually film a bit further away to give them space, but she's currently living in our yard and sees us everyday. So I wanted to just get a bit closer so you could see her cute face up close.
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!
*Edited to add - 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.
This mom & her baby were crossing our yard, to go from one tree to another. In the video, you'll see the baby sloth pop its little head out. If you look closely, you'll also see a lot of moving insects on her.
These are moths, and they're a unique species that live out their entire lifecycle within the sloth system. They live in the fur, and when the sloth comes down to poop, they lay eggs in the poop. Those turn into baby moths that fly up into the canopy to find a new sloth host. Once there, they usually end up damaging their wings and live their entire lives, eventually dying within the sloths fur, as part of an entire ecosystem that creates algae, that become nutrients for the sloth that enter via their skin.
Both the two-toed and three-toed sloths have moths, but the three-toed sloths have special fur that lets more moisture enter the hair follicle...which then feeds the moths, and they're known to have many more living on them. They also have a special scarab beetle that also only lives on the sloth.
I just love wildlife and love to share fun facts about them. There's at least 500 other things I'd like to tell you about sloths, but for now - I'll leave it at the moths 💜
*edited to explain that the algae nutrients enter through their skin so people don't think they're licking themselves. They don't clean themselves, just when they swim.
If you'll be traveling to Playa Negra or Puerto Viejo, Limon today you'll want to be extra careful with your drive. The overnight rain has brought quite a bit of flooding to our area. Please drive carefully! This is a video of some of the road conditions today.
Also, route 32 is flooded today, but not closed yet.
If you'll be traveling to Playa Negra or Puerto Viejo, Limon today you'll want to be extra careful with your drive. The overnight rain has brought quite a bit of flooding to our area. Please drive carefully! This is a video of some of the road conditions today.
Also, route 32 is flooded today, but not closed yet.
We had another sloth visit our house today & I thought I'd share him with you all because some people don't know that it's easy to see whether a sloth is male or female.
This is a male 3-toed sloth, which you can tell by the pattern (Speculum) on his back. The brightness of this pattern shows he is a dominant male about 2 years old & ready to mate.
*The pattern is shown on picture 2.
I share a lot of sloth pictures, so I thought it would be nice to show some pictures of the Reef at Cahuita National Park. These are from our snorkeling tour yesterday. Fun Fact: there's almost always a nurse shark here because they prefer to sleep in the same spot each day...there's usually only one here, but they're known to have Cuddle Piles of up to 40 sharks just laying together!