Nature
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There are some great animal mysteries on Planet Earth. Where do whale sharks give birth? How did the starfish become a star? How did this mystery circle form? One such mystery is related to one of the slowest creatures in the world: are sloths too slow to fart?
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Sloths have super slow digestion and metabolism and only poop about once a week. They mainly consume leaves, fruits, and sometimes the sap of some trees. For years it's been believed that sloths actually didn't fart at all, and any digestion-related gases, such as methane, were absorbed back into the bloodstream and eventually breathed out.
However a recent video shared to social media by veterinarian and sloth enthusiast Andrés Bräutigam and author and broadcaster Lucy Cooke has dispelled that mystery and revealed the gassy truth. Sloths do fart! This is thought to be the first ever recorded evidence of farting in sloths.
"If you work with sloths you live with their gas, everywhere on X-rays, interfering with ultrasounds, it can actually be a huge concern," Bräutigam told LiveScience. "They're so gassy that they even use their stomach gas to float when in the water."
The Hoffmann's two-toed sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni) can be found across South America and has a pretty solitary, inactive lifestyle. The IUCN explained the results of scientific research into sloth behavior: “Preliminary studies in Honduras using camera traps have shown that their activity budgets consist of sleeping (61.3%), feeding (19.4%), preening (16.1%), and defecating (3.2%) (Martínez et al. 2020).”
Animals farting is a surprisingly interesting area of study. Dr Dani Rabaiotti asked Twitter (now X) in 2017 if a snake can fart and the question went viral. Dani and co-author Nick Caruso even turned the subject into a book, Does It Fart?: The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence, the following year.
Cats have been found to fart; lacewing insects can even take down termites with the power of their farts; farting herrings nearly started an international incident; and we've explored how long human farts might last. Plus if you thought farting research was limited to just planet Earth, astronomers have revealed that Uranus actually does smell like farts.
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