This is what sloths have to go through every time they have to go to the bathroom

The life of a sloth seems pretty sweet, doesn’t it? You get to spend all day in trees, eating, sleeping, and moving very slowly so you blend in with your surroundings. Sunday is every day for a sloth. The way of the sloth is to be lazy.

Scientists have found that once a week, a sloth has to go to the bathroom, which is more like giving birth than a quick trip to the bathroom. This makes the sloth’s life seem like a lot of fun, but it’s not.

We don’t blame you if you haven’t given much thought to how sloths go to the bathroom. But you should, because most of the time it’s pretty scary. It turns out that sloths have a really slow bowel system because they move so slowly. Some meals can take them up to a month to digest.

Not only do sloths only go to the bathroom once a week, which is long enough to cause serious constipation, but they also have to do it on the ground, which makes them an easy target for animals that want to eat them.

The Washington Post’s Jason Bittel says that a sloth can lose one-third of its body weight when it poops. That’s a lot of poop to push out!

Rebecca Cliffe, a sloth biologist from Swansea University in the UK, told him, “You can watch their stomachs physically shrink as they poop.” Oh, and you only need one push to get it all out.

Sloths only leave their trees to go to the bathroom, and that’s the only time they have to stand up straight. Cliffe says that when sloths come down from their trees, they do a “poo dance” to dig themselves a small hole.

When they’re done, they do a little dance to hide what they’ve done, and then they go back up, probably feeling a lot lighter than they did on the way down.

Since all animals poop in some way, why do sloths wait so long between bowel movements, and why do they put their lives at risk when they could easily just drop their poop from the trees like other canopy dwellers do?

In short, no one knows for sure. Bittel says that a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin in 2014 came up with one of the best theories, which is that sloths poop in a weird way to keep a balance between them and moths.

The team thinks that moths that live on sloths help a type of algae in the sloths’ fur grow. This is a strange way for the two things to work together. This algae is important to a sloth’s survival because it gives the animal’s fur a greenish color, which helps it hide from predators. It may also give the sloth nutrients if it eats it or absorbs it through its skin.

So, the sloths might poop on the ground so that the moths have a place to lay their eggs. This keeps the moths’ life cycle going.

Cliffe says that this theory doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny because sloths are in danger when they’re on the ground (more than half of them die when they’re not in their trees) and because sloths raised in captivity don’t need moths or algae to live, but they still eat them. Instead, she says it could be about sex.

Whatever is going on, it must be a matter of life or death for survival. That makes me think that it probably has something to do with reproduction, which is what drives most animals to do crazy things.

Cliffe says that the general idea behind this is to let other sloths know that a fertile female is waiting in the tree canopy above. However, more research is needed before any kind of conclusion can be made.

The moral of this story is that we should be thankful that our bodies get rid of waste in a much less painful and dangerous way than a sloth. (And if you feel like you have a lot in common with the sloth, you might want to get that checked out.)