Manuel Antonio National Park

Habitat
This sloth is active mostly in the canopy of tropical evergreen forests.

Range
Two-toed sloths live from northern Nicaragua to Ecuador.

Physical Description
This nocturnal sloth species is pale yellow with brownish limbs. They have two long toes on their front feet, as their name implies, instead of three like their similarly-named relatives. These toes have long claws well-suited for gripping and hanging on limbs and branches. Both the two-toed and three-toed sloths have three toes on the hind feet.

Interesting Biology
The two-toed is seen less frequently than the three-toed because it sleeps well-hidden in leaf masses during the day, and when curled up looks similar to a wasp nest. It has good night vision, and larger eyes and more of a snout than its three-toed relative. The two-toed also lacks a tail. It is more aggressive than the three-toed, and not as shy of people. It is a skilled swimmer, and in some places has been known to frequently cross streams to access more tree species.

The sloth body is specialized for a low intake of indigestible food, particularly mature leaves of forest trees. They use fewer resources per day than most mammals and have corresponding traits such as their famous lethargic behavior, long periods between defecating, and highly variable body temperature. This sloth occupies a home range of less than 2 ha and may use fifty trees of up to thirty species, eating leaves of different ages. They digest food very slowly, taking several days to do so. They descend from the canopy once a week to defecate. Mothers carry their young for a few months, so they have the opportunity to learn what to eat; then the mother leaves to a different part of her home range, bequeathing the first home range to the offspring.

There are more adult females found of this species than adult males, suggesting that there is spacing among males and competition for access to females. It is thought that their populations may have increased over the last few decades due to the disappearance of the harpy eagle, but this is not certain. The sloth is not threatened as much by natural terrestrial predators (such as boas or cats) as much as it is threatened by logging and general deforestation.

Diet
Sloths are specialized for eating leaves of trees and lianas; they will eat leaves from many different species, but they are also picky eaters.

Height/Weight
The two-toed sloth has a head and body length of 0.54 to 0.7 m, and weighs 5.7 kg.

Taxonomy
Order: Xenarthra
Family: Bradypodidae

Habitat
The three-toed sloth prefers tropical evergreen forests at low elevations that have continuous canopy cover.

Range
This sloth species is found from southern Honduras through Panama and western Colombia through the Amazon to northern Argentina.

Physical Description
The three-toed sloth has long coarse hair over dense underfur, a white face with a brown stripe on each side, a brown throat, and a body that is pale brown to yellowish. Each adult male has a unique pattern of yellow hair on its back with a black stripe through the center. As the name suggests, the three-toed has three toes on each of its front and hind feet. (Its relative, the two-toed sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni) also has three toes on the hind feet, but two on the front feet.)

Interesting Biology
The three-toed sloth is active during the day, unlike the nocturnal two-toed sloth, and so is seen more often. This sloth only eats leaves from trees and lianas, but may feed on fifty individual trees of up to thirty species, eating leaves of different ages. Sloths live, feed, mate, and reproduce near the upper levels of the forest canopy. They move to a new tree often enough to balance their diet, or about once every 1.5 days. Home ranges of different individuals may overlap considerably and females tend to be more social than males, but usually one adult (or female with young) will occupy a tree at any given time. Sloths may use different food sources depending upon what their mothers taught them to eat.

Though large for an arboreal mammal, the three-toed sloth must also be light for its size to live in the treetops, so it has reduced muscle mass. They also have an enormous gut capacity-nearly 30% of their body weight! The sloth's diet of leaves is digested very slowly, so they need a large capacity. Sloths consume a significant amount of leaf material in a forest (about 2% of total annual leaf production in Panama). They have a slow metabolism, though, so they have thick fur to insulate them when their body temperature drops at night; their temperature peaks during the day when they bask in the sunlight.

About once a week, the sloth descends from its lofty living space, digs a small hole with its stubby tail, defecates and urinates in the hole, then covers it with leaves using its hind legs and return to its preferred heights. This ordeal lasts less than 30 minutes, but during this time the sloth is vulnerable to predators. While mortality of young sloths is high, individuals that survive to adulthood suffer low mortality rates; they are recorded to live as long as 9 to 11 years, and are thought to live as many as 20 to 30 in the wild.

Several kinds of arthropods live as adults on these sloths. These arthropods leave the sloth to deposit their eggs on the sloth's dung; the hatched larvae feed on the dung, pupate, and after they emerge as adults, fly in search for a sloth to live on. A single sloth may carry nine hundred or more beetles and three species of mites.

An adult female spends half the year pregnant and the other half rearing her single offspring. Young sloths can begin eating leaves when they are two weeks old. As the mother carries the young with her, she shows it which trees and lianas are fit to eat within their home range. When the baby is 6 months old, the mother suddenly leaves the young to her home-range and moves to a nearby range. The young and mother maintain contact through vocalizations, and the young continues to use this portion of her range for a while and then departs.

Diet
A three-toed sloth consumes large amounts of leaves from up to thirty species of trees and lianas; the particular species chosen by an individual sloth vary, and are largely affected by what its mother taught it to eat.

Height/Weight
The three-toed sloth can weigh up to 4.3 kg.

Taxonomy
Order: Xenarthra
Family: Bradypodidae

Habitat
Capuchin monkeys, also called white-faced monkeys, occupy the wet lowland forests on Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and Panama and deciduous dry forest on the Pacific coast.

Range
Capuchins live from northern Colombia to Belize; in Costa Rica and Panama they can live in habitats up to 1,500 m in elevation; they may live as high as 2,000 m in Colombia.

Biology and Natural History
These monkeys are distinct in appearance from other Central American primates: they have a black body with a white upper chest and shoulders, and a white face with a black cap on top of their head. They are diurnal and arboreal, and can frequently be seen using their prehensile tails and strong limbs to swing between trees. Group size averages at 15, with one adult male leading the troop. Females have one baby every 1 to 2 years, who clings to the mother for the first 5 or 6 months of life.

Capuchins have the most versatile diet of New World monkeys. Aside from resting, almost all of their time is spent traveling and foraging, beginning at daybreak and moving until they stop for the night. They forage from the forest floor up to the canopy, and the troop can spread far out laterally as well as they forage. When it is available, they will travel to a spring or other sources to drink water. Because they keep a diverse diet, their actions strongly affect the vegetative populations in their habitats. They may do this by dispersing seeds of some species, pruning others, which stimulates branching, and eating insects that would otherwise damage the plants. In other cases, their determined actions have negative effects. For example, while eating the ant colonies that live inside acacia trees, capuchins can destroy the plants to get to the ants.

The main predators of capuchins may be large raptors, boa constrictors, and cats.

Diet
Capuchins are largely insectivorous, but have a diet broad beyond insects: fruits, flowers, invertebrates, as well as the less frequent bird eggs, bird hatchlings, nestling squirrels, and small lizards. They will eat plant material some times as well. The insects they consume include butterfly larvae, ants, cicadas, grasshoppers, and others. These omnivores are discriminating, though. They like to eat ripe fruit, so they first smell, bite, or squeeze it before ingesting it to make sure it is suitable. With soft fruit they often chew it, swallow the juice and flesh, and spit out the undesireable parts; of other fruits they only eat the seeds; and really hard fruits they may pound or mash to soften them.

Height/Weight
Adults are generally 2.5 to 3.5 kg; males are a little larger than females.

Taxonomy
Order: Primates
Family: Cebidae

Habitat
Squirrel monkeys make their homes in tropical evergreen forests, mangroves, and secondary forests.

Range
The squirrel monkey is found only in Panama and the Pacific lowlands and southern part of Costa Rica.

Physical Description
The squirrel monkey is mostly a greenish yellow color, with a white throat, face, and ears and a black muzzle and tail tip. The undersides of its limbs are white or yellow, and it has a long prehensile tail.

Biology and Natural History
Squirrel monkeys keep in groups which vary widely in size depending on the carrying capacity of their habitat: some troops are as small as 7 to 8, and others as large as 100 (these have been sighted in the Amazon basin). Several adult males will join in a single troop, and there are usually four adult females for every male. Females will have a single baby at a time after a 165-day gestation period.

This diurnal monkey has the most restricted range of Costa Rican primates, although it is very similar to and may be same species as Saimiri sciureus, another squirrel monkey which lives in Amazonian portions of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Guyanas.

Diet
Squirrel monkeys feed on insects, fruits, and sometimes leaves.

Height/Weight
An adult female head and body length averages 28 cm, males 30 cm; the tail is longer than the body, generally 35 to 43 cm. Adult females weigh 0.5 to 0.75 kg, and males weigh 0.7 to 1.1 kg.

Taxonomy
Order: Primates
Family: Cebidae

Habitat
Green iguanas live in the rainforests of northern Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean Islands, and southern Brazil.

Physical Description
Green iguanas have a long body covered with green leathery scales. They have sharp teeth and short legs. Each foot has five toes with sharp claws used for climbing. There is a row of spines extending from their head to their tail.

Their long tails make up over half their body length and are sometimes used to drive away predators. The tails can even be detached if they are caught; if this happens, green iguanas will grow a new tail without any long-lasting damage.

Green iguanas have two nostrils that are used to expel a saline solution that helps regulate their body’s salt level.

Interesting Biology
Green iguanas usually live close to water and are wonderful swimmers. If a green iguana is threatened while in the canopy, it will jump from the trees and escape into the water below. They can stay under water for up to 30 minutes. Incredibly, they are also sturdy enough to jump from 40 feet (12 m) onto the ground and survive.

Green iguanas are arboreal and terrestrial. They live in trees near rivers, lakes, and mangrove swamps. They are diurnal and feed during the day.

In the wild, green iguanas can live up to 20 years. They are a social species; groups of iguanas may be found basking in the sun or searching for food.

The mating season usually occurs in the fall and lasts several weeks. During this season, males become more aggressive. Outside of the mating season, iguanas are less active and tend to spend most of their time resting.

Females lay their eggs in sandy nests and move from their home site to the nest site daily. They travel along a nearly identical path between their home site and the nest each day. Females may travel almost 2 miles (3.2 km) to find a nesting site.

The clutch of eggs is typically between 12 and 30 eggs. After 90 days, baby iguanas hatch. They are 1-foot long when they hatch and quickly disperse after hatching.

Diet
Green iguanas are herbivores that feed on flowers, leaves, and fruit. When foraging, green iguanas will return to the same foraging site each day.

Height/Weight
Green iguanas range from 4.9–6.6 feet (1.5–2 m) and can weigh up to 11 pounds (5 kg).

Brief Taxonomy
Order: Squamata.

Family: Iguanidae.

Habitat
These ants are present in many forest and agricultural situations in humid areas.

Range
They can be found in regions of Central and South America with humid tropical forest.

Physical Description
The largest member of the colony is the queen, who can be twice as big as the largest soldier and has a gigantic abdomen full of eggs waiting to be laid. Males, which are routinely born when breeding season comes, are also large but not as enormous as mature queens. Soldiers are the largest workers that look big for an ant, even without their smaller companions for comparison. A soldier is reddish, with a huge, heart-shaped head, giant mandibles, long legs and a bristly body. Media workers are half as big, but still have visible mandibles. The smallest participants of this colony are the minima, who look the darkest and most proportionate.

Biology and Natural History
These ants are a favorite sight in tropical American forests as they march down tree trunks and through the forest carrying small leaf bits on their backs like sails. The natural assumption is that they eat the leaves, but these ants are gardeners. Their main food is a fungus that they cultivate underground in their colonies. This soft, spongy fungus grows on leaves, which is why the ants go to such lengths to obtain leaves for their gardens.

The colony designates a certain tree as the current primary leaf source. The media workers communicate through pheromones and shuttle back and forth between a tree and the nest. Medias do the actual leaf-cutting for the colony. Soldier ants patrol these lines of workers for protection. When the media workers return to the nest, minima accept or reject the leaf parts. Inside the nest, the minima give the main direct care to the gardens. They clean the new leaves, chew them into smaller pieces, and add feces and saliva to make a sticky material, which they attach to the fungus. The fungus grows over the new leaf material, and when it matures the ants collect the hyphae to eat. The minima also take care of the nest’s developing young.

Nests are complex systems of tunnels and chambers underground. Large, mature ones can function with millions of workers and the mound may cover many square meters of ground. The chambers are mostly occupied by the fungus gardens, but others are for raising the young and one houses the queen.

Over time, this species of ant and this species of fungus have evolved to form a very tight co-dependency. The fungus has lost the ability to reproduce on its own, so it does not exist in the forest where the ants are not taking care of it. This means that starting a new colony is a bit complicated. Before a new queen leaves the nest where she was born, she takes a piece of fungus into a pouch in her abdomen. Then at dawn she joins the other queens and males that are congregating in the air to mate. After mating, the queen returns to the ground, digs a small tunnel, and tries to begin a garden and lay eggs. If the queen is not able to keep her fungus garden alive, she will starve to death. If things go well, the fungus and the queen will stay alive until the first workers emerge after 4 or 5 weeks and begin to care for her and feed the fungus. It takes a colony 3 or 4 years to mature.

Diet
The primary food consumed by these ants is the fungus they garden.

Height/Weight
On average, a minima is 2 mm long, a media worker is 10 mm long, and the largest soldier can reach 20 mm in length. Reproductive males are even bigger, but the queens take the crown at 30 to 40 mm from head to wing tips.

Taxonomy
Order: Hymenoptera
Family: Formicidae