Bradypus variegatus
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Manuel Antonio, aggregated onto a 10 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December, with the widest coverage in March. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 10 squares of 10 km carry records for Three-toed Sloth in and around Manuel Antonio, and the 109 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.
The brown-throated three-toed sloth has committed so completely to slowness that its fur hosts an ecosystem: green algae for camouflage, and moths that live nowhere else on Earth, shuttling between the sloth and the dung it descends, once a week, all the way to the forest floor to deposit. That weekly commute is the most dangerous hour of a sloth's life and the least explicable habit in mammalogy; the leading theory involves keeping the moth garden growing. Everything else is economy: leaves for food, a metabolism at half-speed, a body temperature that drifts with the weather, and a face permanently arranged into a smile it did not choose. Costa Rica without a sloth sighting is a trip incomplete.
Never touch or hold a sloth and refuse any photo-with-sloth offer; handling stresses them severely and fuels an illegal trade.