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The other cool thing I saw on Sunday July 12, 2018

A climbing sloth.  Sloths are rather common near the station buildings, but they’re almost always hanging unmoving from a branch and are frequently difficult to identify as mammals. But as I was leaving the lab for lunch, there was a sloth crossing from one tree to another. Even better, it was maybe 20 feet in the air and crossing over the path I was walking along. It was so interesting that I stayed until it had made it into the new tree, which took at least five minutes.

A climbing sloth looks like a rock climber in slow motion. Unlike a squirrel or a monkey, they can’t move over flimsy anchor points quickly, so their combined hand- and footholds must always be able to support their weight. Instead of quick bounding, there were a lot of spread-eagle moments and maneuvering so that the sloth would be able to grab a particular twig or branch with the correct appendage. At one point, the sloth hung midway between the two trees and paused. We joked that it was taking a nap, but I can’t rule out the possibility that it was considering how to get a good enough grip on the new branch to cross over without breaking it: After that pause, the sloth repositioned itself so that it could grab the new branch closer to its base and successfully made it over.

Unfortunately, the rest of my Sunday was not as exciting: I realized that I was making gadget components with the wrong type of wire and had been since Saturday evening. Between needing to undo everything I’d done and redo it properly, I think I lost a day of work. But the gadgets are finished and we’re field-testing them so that I can set up an experiment with them during my next trip.