A British PhD student is using backpack transmitters to tag and monitoring the daily activity of wild sloths.
So far, Becky Cliffe has fitted the transmitters to four wild sloths - named Burrito, Star, Pancake and Apple. These can track where each sloth has been, what it has been doing, and how much energy it has been using.
An old friend wandered through the sanctuary today - Burrito, one of the first sloths I tagged with a backpack!
This morning, she shared a picture of the first baby - or cub - to be tagged in the project. His name is Mr. Bojangles and he is ridiculously cute.
Say hello to Mr Bojangles - the first baby sloth to be tagged with a tracking backpack!
The Sloth Backpack Project hopes to gather enough information on these elusive creatures to develop a captive release program allowing the safe release of hand-reared sloths to the wild.
The research is based at The Sloth Sanctuary in Costa Rica, which advocates the protection and rehabilitation of sloths in recovery and is home to Buttercup the sloth. You may remember as the sloth from this video that showed the world "what a horny sloth sounds like".
Baby sloth feeding time at our juvenile nursery! Photo credit to @SuziEszterhas
You can follow Becky and The Sloth Sanctuary on Twitter.
Be warned, the photos are so cute that they may cause you to break and/or have a melt down like Kristen Bell did when she met a Sloth for the first time.
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