Sloths are adorable creatures who seem to take life very lightly. As their name suggests they spend their days lazing around by hanging from trees, munching on food, sleeping all the time and moving very slowly. However, one thing in their life is not this peaceful and is rather agonising – pooping.
Scientists say that the pain a sloth goes through is similar to a woman giving birth. They also attribute this awful process the creatures have to go through every time they defecate to the slow life they lead.
Experts explain that some meals that the slot eats can take one month to get digested because of slow metabolism. This often leads to sluggish bowel movement, which is akin to terrible constipation.
Sloths poop one a week and it is the only time they leave a tree and come down. The fact that they have to poop on the ground makes them an easy target for predators.
Once a sloth poops, one-third of its body weight can get reduced. "You can watch their stomachs physically shrink as they poo," said sloth biologist Rebecca Cliffe from Swansea University in the UK, according to Washington Post.
Sloth's weird pooping routine is not over. Cliffe said that sloths have weird poop dances – once before pooping to dig a hole and once after pooping to cover it.
However, scientists are not very sure why sloths risk their lives in going down and poop on the ground.
One hypothesis by researchers from the University of Wisconsin back in 2014 says that the creature do this to a weird way to keep a balance between them and moths that live on sloths help fertilise a type of algae in the sloths' fur, which in turn, gives a greenish colour camouflaging them with trees. To give the moths a suitable place to lay eggs, they go to ground to poop.
However, Cliffe is not very convinced by this theory and says that it has to do something with reproduction as that is the "driving fact behind most animals' crazy behaviours."
