![]() ![]() And algae seems to be a good nutritional supplement-though the researchers haven’t crunched the numbers to see just how much energy and nutrients the algae could provide. Moths mean more nitrogen (why, exactly, is still an open question-the moths might be dragging the nitrogen up from the sloth poop or releasing it when they die). So the perilous pooping process keeps the moths around. The algae also turned up in the sloths’ stomachs, and when the researchers analyzed it they found that it was easily digestible and rich in carbs, proteins, and fats. They found that sloths that had more moths on them also had more nitrogen-rich hair and more algae growth. After removing and counting the moths from each hair sample, they looked at the nutrients available in the hair and then compared them to some sloth stomach contents to see if there was any connection between the moths, the contents of the hair, and what the sloth had been eating. The researchers took locks of hair from the ground-pooping brown-throated three-toed sloth and from Hoffmann’s two-toed sloth, which prefers a “bombs away” style of defecation. ![]() ![]() Maybe the sloths are just as dependent on the moths, and aid their lifecycle because the bugs are somehow nutritionally important. The females lay their eggs in the sloth dung, which the larva then live off of until they become adults and can fly upward to move onto their own sloth. Among these tenants are moths from the genus Cryptoses, commonly (and adorably) called “sloth moths.” These moths are absolutely dependent on their host sloth’s weekly bathroom trip. Their thick fur is home to all kinds of algae, fungi, arachnids and insects. The key here is the miniature zoo that sloths carry around with them. Pauli and his team wondered if, when sloths went downstairs to use the bathroom, they were also grabbing some extra food. A sloth’s main source of food, leaves, is pretty nutrient-poor and not easy to digest to begin with, so they’re under some serious nutritional constraints. To live on a tree branch, you have to be relatively small and light, but a limit on body size also puts a limit on how much you can digest. Sloths are among the 0.02 percent of mammals that are specialized arboreal herbivores, living in trees and foraging for food there. Ecologist Jonathan Pauli and other researchers from Wisconsin and Virginia have a different idea, though, that’s rooted in the sloth’s dietary problems. Scientists have come up with a few possible benefits for ground-pooping, like fertilizing the trees that the sloths call home or revealing their locations to other sloths so they can mate (how romantic). If three-toed sloths keep making these costly and risky trips to a ground-floor bathroom, there must be something that makes the trip worth it. It can’t be pleasant to be standing underneath one when that happens, but the sloths are safer for it. If a simple poop can cost a sloth its life, why do it like that? The three-toed sloth’s cousin, the two-toed sloth, simply defecates from the canopy. Climbing down a tree to ground level and then back can cost a sloth as much as 8 percent of its daily calorie intake, and the animals are out of their element and incredibly vulnerable on the ground-more than half of all recorded sloth deaths are caused by attacks from predators at or near the ground. This is not the most efficient way to poop, nor the safest. ![]() After shimmying down the trunk of a tree, a sloth digs a small hole in the dirt, poops in it, covers their makeshift toilet with leaves, and then climbs back up. They only descend from their leafy home once a week to make a bathroom run. They live high in the tree canopy and feed exclusively on the foliage there, hanging around most of the time and moving slowly when they move at all. Three-toed sloths are just that: three-toed, and slothful. ![]()
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