Fitz asks: WHY DO SLOTHS POOP ON THE GROUND? Hosts Mike Bennett and Chanel Hason answer Fitz’s question, share some other cool sloth facts, and discuss Mike’s iconic sloth Slow Down signs.

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Credits

• Hosted by: Mike Bennett & Chanel Hason

• Produced & Edited by: Jon Richardson

• Music by: Gretchen Lohse & Thomas Hughes of Carol Cleveland Sings

• Intro Animation by: Silas Bell & Kyle Bell of Castle Animation

• Artwork by Fuzzzbrain

Special thanks to

• Teddy Albertson

• Fitz & Fitz’s family

• Michele Kraus Bennett

• Cayley Pater

• The Elakha Alliance

• Dr. Rebecca Cliffe

• Sloths in general

Hi, my name is Fitz. I'm seven and three quarters.

And I have a question.

Why do sloths go all the way to the ground to just go poo?

Why not just poop in the sky?

Open up the door to habitats you

can explore with animals and

more.

In the Zooquarium Zooquarium The Zoo Zoo.

Zoo.

Zooquarium!

Fitz, you came to the right place.

We're here at the Zooquarium

podcast where we get to find out

together why sloths don't poop

in the sky and instead poop on

the ground.

We have Chanel here, our resident animal expert.

Chanel, I'm just going to throw it straight to you because I

don't have an answer.

I love when we get to talk about poop.

That's amazing.

Who doesn't love to talk about that?

First, let's talk a little bit about sloths themselves.

Mike, do you have any guess what animal is most closely related

to a sloth?

I'll give you a hint.

They like to eat a lot of ants.

That was a that was a very helpful hint.

I'm just gonna say anteater.

That's correct. Wow. Yes. So

sloths are most closely related

to anteaters.

They have poor vision and poor hearing.

So they depend on their sense of

smell and touch to find their

food.

And what do they eat?

Any guesses?

What do sloths eat?

Yeah,

I'm gonna say ants

no,

Ugh!

but that was a good guess because they are related to

anteaters, but they like to eat just twigs and leaves and buds

because they live most of their lives up in the tree canopy.

So that's the kind of closest

thing for them to eat and snack

on.

But they have a really low metabolic rate, which is why

maybe they only poop once a week so they can store about a third

of their body weight in feces, poop, in their body.

So that's probably also a

trigger for them to go down to

the bottom of the tree canopy to

release themselves.

But scientists don't really know why they do that.

So some guesses are that it releases pheromones at the

bottom of the tree for other sloths to know if there's a

sloth up in that tree.

It can be, you know, keeping

their habitat clean so they

don't maybe want to poop where

they have to walk around all day

or climb around up in the tree

canopy.

But it is a very dangerous thing for them to do.

Because they are such a slow moving animal, they are prone to

predation, so animals try to eat them when they get to the bottom

of the rainforest floor.

Any guesses what might be a

natural predator for sloths,

Mike?

Well, I guess if you spend your entire week doubling your own

body weight with poop, anything could eat a sloth.

But there's some scary critters in in sloth habitats.

I'm sure there's a cat of some kind that would

Yeah.

love to eat a sloth.

Yeah, definitely.

There's leopards, ocelots, even a harpy eagle, which is a really

beautiful bird if you haven't seen one before.

They also try and eat sloths.

So there's a lot of scary things.

So they get to the bottom of the tree and they actually do

something called a poop dance.

And they just kind of shake their body.

Yeah, back and forth, like

they're jamming to their

favorite song.

And maybe that helps them, their metabolism kind of get going for

them to poop.

Scientists don't really know why they do the poop dance, but I

like to think that maybe they're just so excited that they made

it all the way down to the tree to release themselves.

And then the three toed sloths actually use their tail to kind

of make a little hole for them to poop in.

And then the two toed sloths,

they actually kind of just use

their booty.

They just kind of plimp there on

the bottom of the tree and then

poop there.

And that's to, like, hide the evidence that they exist in the

canopy, I guess.

Yeah.

Right. Okay. Or are they just very clean animals?

I mean, they are actually pretty dirty.

There's algae that grows in

their fur because they are such

a slow moving animal in a

tropical climate.

Algae grows in there.

And actually, there's something called a sloth moth that lives

in their fur and kind of hides in that algae.

And so every time they go down to poop, these sloth moths.

Say that ten times fast.

Actually go to the poop and lay their eggs, and then the larvae

come out of the poop.

And then once they become a

moth, then they fly up that tree

to find the sloth where they

came from.

You know, before this conversation, had you asked me

if there was an animal I'd love to spend a week as it probably

would have been sloth.

And the further we go into this conversation, the lower the

sloth ends up on my list.

This is

Yeah,

wild.

not ideal, but something that

they're actually really good at

is swimming.

So they have these big long arms that they're using to hang up in

the tree canopy.

And so normally they go about thirteen feet per minute.

But in the water swimming they

go about forty four feet per

minute.

So they are ideal little Michael Phelps out there swimming.

And they're also really good at

I'm sure, holding a slow down

sign like the one that you have

behind you.

So tell us about your iconic sloth slow down signs and how

they originated, Mike.

Yeah. Wow, what a segue.

Thank you.

Um. So, yeah, I, um, I've been making animal art for a long

time, and in the early pandemic, I created this project called

the A to Zoo, and that was kind of an evolving front lawn

display of animals where considering that the only safe

thing to do was go for a walk, I was trying to entertain my

neighborhood, and people would cruise on by and see the new

animal every day.

The address was a secret.

It didn't stay a secret.

So it got a little busy on my street, and one of my neighbors,

very kindly, was like, hey, this is very cool what you're doing,

but we have kids.

There's a lot of cars.

So I thought the kind thing to

do would be to hand paint a

couple of heavy, large, wooden,

slow signs that folks could put

in their front lawn or in the

middle of the street at that

point.

And it worked.

It was super cool.

And one day I didn't have anything to post on Instagram.

So I posted a photo of my slow signs and they took off.

And I had like infinite emails

from people asking me where they

could buy one, and that was not

an option.

So I linked up with a local print shop.

We made a bunch of slow signs.

We gave them out for free for a while.

There were secret addresses that we would reveal, and then people

would drive so fast to get there to get them.

So we stopped doing that, naturally.

But now, since then, they've kind of like taken on their own

life and they're all over the world, which is very cool.

You can see them as like from

coast to coast in the United

States.

And I've even heard rumor of one in England, which is very cool.

Wow.

Yeah. And just to hear how like aware sloths are about their

environment, you know, I chose the sloth because they're slow.

But but to hear how aware they are, I'm just like great traffic

awareness and slow animals we'll pretend that I planned that.

I love it.

Yeah. It's whenever I go walking around my neighborhood, I see at

least almost a dozen of your slow down signs.

And each time I'm like, oh, Mike Bennett.

Oh, Mike Bennett.

Like, you're a part of them internally.

And they can listen to me say that.

My

So

instinct

yeah, it's.

is to apologize when I hear that, by the way.

No, I love it.

It's great because there's, you

know, a lot of kids around these

Portland neighborhoods.

And beyond that, it's a great

way to, you know, kind of link

animals to our, our human

habitat.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

So I just need to go.

We need to go backwards for a

second, because I just took on

more sloth information than I've

ever had.

And I think after we record this podcast, I need to sit down and

like, look up some of these sloth dances and I need

Yes.

to know what a sloth moth looked like, looks like.

Because right now, in my head, as a cartoonist, I'm just

imagining a sloth with wings that lives on a sloth, and I

might have to go draw that if I'm being completely honest.

So thank you for teaching me about that.

That's amazing.

Yeah. I didn't know the history of of your sloth signs.

So now I know.

Thank you for that.

And I do have one of your signs

in my yard, but it's actually of

a sea otter, so you'll have to

come

And you,

to

you

the.

know a thing or two about sea otters.

I know a little bit about sea otters.

Yes.

Well, thank you so much for

listening to the Zooquarium

podcast, everybody.

If you have a question for us about animals or their habitats,

or if you just want to show us your sloth dance, you can head

on over to thezooquarium.com/podcast and

submit your own video for us to answer like Fitz today.

Yeah, and be sure to subscribe to the Zooquarium Podcast on all

your preferred channels.

We are everywhere, especially on YouTube and Spotify.

You can get the video component,

which I think is really fun

because you can see us do a

sloth dance, the poop, the poop

dance.

And tune in every week for another zooquatic adventure into

the world of animals with Mike.

And Chanel.

Thanks for listening.

Sonny the Snail: The Zooquarium Podcast is hosted

Sonny the Snail: by Mike Bennett and Chanel

Sonny the Snail: Hason.

Sonny the Snail: This episode's question asker is Fitz.

Sonny the Snail: Thanks, Fitz!

Sonny the Snail: This show is produced and edited

Sonny the Snail: by Jon Richardson with music by

Sonny the Snail: Carol Cleveland Sings and our

Sonny the Snail: intro animation is by Castle

Sonny the Snail: Animation.