For years, scientists believed sloths didn't fart, assuming that the methane produced by their slow digestion was simply absorbed into the blood and exhaled through the mouth. But now researchers have captured what may be the world's first video of a sloth farting.
A video showing a baby Hoffman's two-toed sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni) playing in a bucket of water was posted by zoologist and TV presenter Lucy Cook (@luckycooke) and wildlife veterinarian Andres Saenz Brautigam (@slothvet.ands) to Instagram on Tuesday (July 15).
“Yes, sloths fart. And I may have just witnessed the first documented case,” Cook wrote in her post.
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Cook told Live Science that the “sloths don't fart” belief was popularized by a book by biologist Dani Rabaiotti and researcher Nick Caruso called “Does It Fart?: The Complete Field Guide to Animal Flatulence” (Quercus Publishing, 2017), which identified sloths as the only mammals that can do without farts.
“I always thought it was odd that sloths ‘absorb’ intestinal gas into their blood and then exhale it,” Cook wrote in an email. “But the author is a biologist, and her work is based on careful research and is supported by scientific sources that I have also verified.”
But when Brautigam, a veterinarian at Toucan Rescue Ranch in Costa Rica who has been studying sloths for more than a decade, told Cook that the tree-dwelling creatures do make sounds, she didn't
Sourse: www.livescience.com
