Stuff You Should Know - How Sloths Work

Episode Date: July 11, 2019

Everyone knows sloths are super slow, but do you know they’re slow because their bodies produce an astoundingly small amount of energy? And did you know that might be an adaptation that protects them from predators? Sloths are awesome and we prove it. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Attention world, if you can make it to America, then come see us. We are going out on the road for SYSK Live again, and we are going to start the whole thing off in Chicago on July 24th.

That's right, and if you can't make it to America, maybe make it to Canada, because we're gonna be in Toronto in the next night, Danforth Music Hall, then in August, we're gonna do a couple of dates at the Wilbur in Boston on October 29th in Portland, Maine's lovely state theater on August 30th. Yep, and then we're going to be heading down to Florida.

We're gonna be at Plaza Live on October 9th, and then the next night, we're gonna be in New Orleans at the Civic Theater. That's right, and then we're gonna round it out in Brooklyn October 23, 24, and 25 at the Bell House. Yep, so come see us. You can get tickets and info at SYSKLive.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,

a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Josh T. over there. That's right. Thinking about the number 23. Just sitting there thinking about it.

Oh, is he on 23? That's right, I forgot that. Yeah, he's in the Illuminati stuff, if I remember correctly. And he's also, look at this guy. He is so good, Chuck. He knows to just sit there and keep quiet, even though he's dying inside right now to talk about the number 23.

If I just pulled out some random show from like, our archive from years ago, could you say who the producer was? Oh, I don't know, let's give it a try. Um, jeez, now I have to think of a show that we did years ago. Well, since we're doing an animal show today, the only thing I can think of is animals.

Elephants, I haven't eaten that long ago. Probably Jerry. Yeah. Or how about this? Can you name any shows that other guest producers were on, off the top of your head? No. This game turns so lame so fast.

I feel like we, well, Matt Frederick's too busy these days, but we can't have Matt anymore in here because all Matt would do is sit there and like, nod his head like, uh-huh, yeah, yeah. Either that or his hands would be clasped together with this look of sheer joy on his face, just to hear us talk. It was great.

It made recording that much better, you know? Those are the old days. Matt's older and more cynical now. He doesn't care anymore about us. Right, yep. He's been released into the forest like a baby sloth. Right, which is good. That's what you want to do with either Matt Frederick

or a baby sloth. You don't want to keep them in captivity because sloths don't do very well in captivity. Matt does okay in captivity, he's fine, but a sloth not nearly as well as what Matt Frederick can do in captivity. Yeah, and you were watching just before you recorded everyone should know Josh was watching the

28 million view YouTube video of Kristen Bell. Can we call her friend of the show? Sure, I mean, she's probably not going to write into object to it, so yeah, we could call her that. She's the stuff you should know listener or has been over the years as is her husband, Mr. Dak Shepherd, who was also a movie crush guest. And he has his own podcast to armchair expert.

Yeah, he's crushing it right out of the gate. For sure. Those are good podcasts, actually. I don't know if you listen to those, they're good. So she, very famously, he brought her a sloth on her birthday and she went on Ellen and they showed video and it's still just one of the great videos you can ever watch.

It is, it's very sweet. She's like having a meltdown and- Fully, fully melting down. Yeah, like crying, like sobbing. Oh yeah. Because she's so excited that there's a sloth in her house because this is something she's wanted to meet a sloth like for her whole life and now she gets to.

Yeah, and I watched it again today too because after doing this research, I was like, wait a minute, was she holding a sloth? Because that's not good. And it showed a picture and she's not. The sloth is on its little perch. And she's very respectfully next to the sloth, exactly how it should be.

If there's any reason that kept Kristen Bell from being America's sweetheart, which I can't think of one, that erased it right there. Just knowing how to be around a sloth when you have meltdowns at the idea of being around a sloth, that's some serious self-control for the benefit of the animal, that's great stuff. Yeah, not touching the animal and literally offering

for me to change my daughter's diaper in her restaurant booth. Yeah, that's right. Because she said the bathroom was dirty. She's a class act. Class act. So Charles, you mentioned elephants. We did an elephant episode and that's similar

to the whole sloth thing, like you see a sloth, especially if you see a sloth in captivity at a zoo or something like that. You're like, well, I want to carry it around like a baby or something like that. It's a sloth. It's one of the cutest things on the planet. But you don't want to do that.

Sloths don't really deal with captivity very well, although they can live way longer in captivity. They're not necessarily happy. But I was thinking one of the reasons why people seem to think that they are happy or would want to be picked up is because at least among one type of sloth, they're always smiling.

Oh, man. They're smiling, which makes them super cute. They also have a mullet. That's the three-toed bradypus sloth. Yeah. They have a mullet and they are always smiling. But if you look, it's just the coloring on their face that happens to resemble a smile.

They have so little muscle mass that they don't have the capability of smiling, making their face smile. It's just the colorings on their fur. Yeah, which can be very misleading to us dumb humans because they can be scared or stressed out of their mind and it still looks like they're just chilling and smiling. Right, look, it's smiling.

It loves it when I juggle it with two bowling balls and a flaming pitch fork. Oh. It's the best I could come up with. I wonder where that was going. Have you ever seen a flaming pitch fork in something? Only on the Simpsons. So let's get into this because the cuteness is just,

it's cute overload when it comes to sloths. They are ridiculously cute. Their whole vibe is just, right up my alley at least. Sure. Not that I'm lazy. Mellow and... But well, you know me, the real me isn't super mellow but I like to pretend to be.

Sure. I strive to be. You get the sloth vibe. Yeah, it's an aspirational state slothness. Yeah, so I love the very first sentence of this research says they are highly successful which kind of cracked me up when I read it because I pictured sloths of course in business suits

like running a company. Right, can you hurry it up? I have no time for this. But what that means is that for a very, very, very long time sloths generally have flourished in the world. Yeah, they think that they probably evolved. They're part of a group or a family or some taxonomic designation called Zenithara.

And Zenithara are, it's like the weirdo group that's sloths and eaters and armadillos. Sure, depending on whether you want to be classy or not or something tough. Sure. Sure, Zenithara, okay, I'll go with that. But it's sloths and eaters, armadillos. Oh, yeah.

Pretty much any odd animal you can think of would fall into Zenithara, what did you say, Zenithara? Zenithara. Zenithara, so they all kind of formed together in isolation on what was once an island, South America is as long back as 80 million years ago. What? Yeah.

Is it an island? Yeah, you know, like the whole continental drifts and all that stuff. And it decided to make friends with Central America? Yeah, and higher sea levels, that kind of thing. When the sea levels got locked up in ice or when a lot of seawater got locked up in ice, the land bridge that is Central America came along

and said, hey, build some ziggurats on me. So they are highly successful. They are very slow moving like everyone knows. They are in Central and South America still, no surprise there. And like you said, there are two kinds. There are the two-toed colepis. I was going with colioepis.

Oh. Coloepis, coloepis. Coloepis? Your rhymes with bocephus. Okay, that's a good way to remember it. Sure. And then the little Tom Bradypus, which is the three-toed, but it's a bit of a misnomer because the two-toed

has three toes, but two fingers. Right, that's how they're classified or separated from one another, the two-toed or the three-toed, right? So, and technically I read somewhere, Chuck, that they actually don't have legs. They're a four-armed creature. Oh, is that the designation for arms?

Yeah, from what I saw, but they really just pay attention to how many fingers are on the four arms or the four limbs. Gotcha. What we would think of as their arms, their front arms, but they're really all four arms. Okay. And the way that I kept the two separated, so two-toed is coloepis,

three-toed is Bradypus, is that I thought the Brady bunch has more kids. So the Bradypus has more toes. And it's been working all day, frankly. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's the second mnemonic device you've dropped in the first like 10 minutes of the show. Yeah, what do you think?

You're doing great. It's good. As long as it's working. So the two-toed guys and ladies, they roam, as far as sloths go, a pretty great distance. They can forage in ranges up to 350 acres, whereas the three-toed guys, they only have a range of about 13 acres.

And then there's the cutest of all sloth, the pygmy sloth, that are just on one little island off the coast of Panama. Right, and they're actually critically endangered as far as sloths go, which we'll get to later. They are so cute. It's ridiculous. But like as close as the sloths are,

like there's not that many differences besides the number of toes on their forelimbs. The fact that one has the smile markings, the three-toed has the smile markings in the mullet haircut. The other one looks like there's a site called Slothville. It's a conservation site run by a woman named Lucy Cook. And she says that the two-toed sloths look a bit like a cross between a wookie and a pig.

And I think she absolutely nailed it with that description, right? Yeah, what does them look like the little, what was the Christmas special? What was Chewbacca's son? Oh man, if you can remember that, Chuck, I'll buy you a case of beer. Oh man.

Put your phone down. I don't know, I can't remember, but that's sort of what it reminded me of. Norman, I'm pretty sure it was Norman. Norman, Norman Bacca. You're right. I can't remember. I can't either.

I'm sure there's somebody out there. It's like, you owe me a case of beer, Josh. I only said that I was making that offer to Chuck. So a wookie and a pig, that's a pretty good descriptor. Right, so my point is this though, as similar as two-toed sloths and three-toed sloths seem, there are some differences, but really in the grand scheme of things,

they seem a lot closer than say, a dove and a sloth. Yeah, agreed. A flaming pitchfork and a sloth. Agreed. But they're actually really separate. They're not even, they're multiple different species. They're not even in the same genus. And for comparison, humans and chimps are in the same genus.

Yeah, that's crazy. The two different types of sloths aren't even in the same genus. So there's a big distinction between the two. And I looked up sloth news, which is fast-breaking strangely enough. But there's a study that came out recently where they did some molecular DNA studies on sloth evolution.

And they found that the two-toed and the three-toed sloths may be even further separated and may have evolved independently of one another. That they may be even more distantly related than we think. So as similar as they seem to be, they're actually pretty different. Although they are really similar.

It's a weird fluke of evolution all around. Yeah, characteristically, I think they're fairly similar. The two-toed variety are a little bit bigger and hang upside down a little bit more than the three-toed variety, who you'll see those sitting upright sometimes in trees. But I read somewhere that sloths can spend up to 90% of their life upside down, which is amazing.

They do everything upside down. They mate upside down. They give birth upside down. They do almost everything that they do upside down hanging. And did you say it was the two-toed that spend more of their life upside down than the three-toed? Yeah, two-toed a little bit more hang time.

Right, so that's one difference. But even still, it's not like the three-toed are just averse to being upside down. I think both of them spend so much time upside down that the part of their hair, rather than being on their backs or their head, the top of their head like ours is, it's on their bellies because they're upside down so much that that's how gravity is forced there to part,

just like shimp, like an upside down shimp. Boy, shimp's hair, wow. It was something. It was something. He had the original butt cut. Yeah, it was, wasn't it? Yeah. So the Brady Puss also has an extra neck vertebrae.

So if you've ever seen a sloth, seemingly turn its head 360 degrees, it's because they can turn their head about 270 degrees and have almost a 360 degree, counting their peripheral vision range of sight. Yes, yes, but that is- Without moving your body, that is. That is strictly from moving their head.

They actually, again, they lack so much muscle mass and tissue that they don't have the muscles to move their eyeballs in their heads. So when they look around, they have to move their whole head. I felt like that before. But it has helped out. For sure, especially after a hard night on a Saturday. But the fact that they have that extra vertebrae

helps them look around more, but it's just one more thing that make them an extraordinarily unusual creature because only sloths and manatees are mammals that have more than seven vertebrae. Every other mammal on the planet has seven vertebrae and sloths and manatees are the only two that don't. A manatee's a mammal?

Yeah, all right. Yeah, they breathe air. They just spend a lot of time in water. They were probably some sort of like wolf or bear or something that eventually took to water. Well, speaking of bears and water, sloths are really good swimmers. If you look up a YouTube video of sloth swimming,

it's actually, they can kind of get around and are somewhat graceful in the water. They can hold their breath for up to 40 minutes. And in order to do so, they can cut their heart rate by two thirds and their metabolism down, which is like, they already, I mean, we'll get into their metabolism later, but that's saying something

if they can cut their metabolism down even more on purpose. Yeah, for real, because the sloth metabolism is a thing to behold in your mind. It's like, yeah, we'll get to it in a little bit, but just know that I'm excited to talk about sloth metabolism. Okay, and then I mentioned, speaking of bears, their original predecessor back in the day

was something called a giant ground sloth or a megatherium. And if you look at this thing, it looks sort of like a bear. Its face is a little bit different, but it kind of looks like just a big, giant brown bear. It looked like a giant beaver to me without the tail. Oh, really?

That's, I mean, that's what I thought. Well, a beaver without a tail is really just a tiny bear with big teeth. I guess so, I guess so. But they found that just from examining its bones, they found that it could walk on its back legs, which makes it the largest bipedal land mammal that ever lived, which is pretty cool.

And there was a sloth ancestor. Amazing. And we used to eat them too, Chuck. We found tool marks on some of the bones. They think, well, humans probably hunted it to extinction. Yeah, took took, I guess. Yeah. Although we determined he was a neanderthal, right?

He's been designated officially as a neanderthal. Shall we take a break? I think it's high time, man. All right. This is our slowest episode ever, and we'll be right back. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude,

bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

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Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

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So before we get going on more real sloth stuff, I'm assuming you have not seen the movie Zootopia or have you? I don't think no, I haven't. Have you made a kids movie? No, no, I haven't. There's a sloth scene where that's very, very funny. And in fact, they made that a very big part of the original movie trailer where these animals are in a hurry to find out

some information from the DMV. And so they go to the DMV. And of course, as sort of an in-joke to anyone who's ever been at the DMV, which is notably slow, they had a sloth. It was completely run by sloths. And there was just this one great scene where they go up and try to get information from a sloth. And they really do it right.

They take their time. And it's funny for kids and adults to highly recommend. It is. And I mean, it's probably fairly accurate because if sloths, everybody knows they're super, super slow. How slow? But it's not really an overstatement or exaggeration. They genuinely are extremely slow.

I saw that they move on the ground, which is when they move about the fastest aside from swimming. It's something like half a kilometer per hour at top speed. And that they'll move maybe six to eight feet up a tree in a minute. Yeah. And these things are made to climb trees. And that's how fast, or I should say,

that's how slow they move. Yeah, the actual term sloth dates back to the 12th century in Spain, or in the Spanish language at least. They were called los perizosos, which translates to the lazies, which is hysterical, because Emily and I often call animals lazies. Look at those lazies, because pets are lazy. Sure, yeah.

They're not sloth-lazy, though. No, they're not sloth-lazy. But that literally translates into the lazies. And then when the Spanish explorers started talking about the lazies, it was translated into the word sloth in English in about the, I guess, early 17th century. Yeah, yeah, because it was a cleric, I believe, who was like, oh, well, we don't talk about laziness.

We talk about sloth, because it's one of the seven deadly sins. No, it's really kind of a down word when it's used as an insult. For sure. But it's like, the sloths are the best, so I don't know. I like it. I know, but at the same time, it's like if somebody calls you slothful,

you know that they walked right past lazy, like they saw it and said, nope, lazy's not enough. I really want to drive home for how much I disdain your laziness. Yeah, that is a good descriptor. Like if someone at work is slow with something and you describe them as slothful instead of just slow. Right, because you're passing judgment on them as well,

like biblical-style judgment. Like you're going to hell. That's how slow you took in getting this TPS report to me. Two-toed sloths are omnivorous, so they can eat animals. I didn't see where they do that a lot. They mainly still eat fruits and leaves and twigs and things, but they will eat birds sometimes

and lizards. I would imagine they have to be wounded or something because it's not like they, I mean, surely they don't hunt. They're not fast enough, right? Yeah, they're not snatching a bird out of the air or something like that. They're not going after hummingbirds.

It would have to be like maybe a recently killed or an injured bird. And man, if you're an injured bird in the tropical rainforest of Central and South America, I'm guessing the last thing you want to see is a hungry two-toed sloth slowly coming at you because you know it's going to take a really long time for it to eat you alive.

There's a funny YouTube video actually called When a Sloth Chases You. And it's just a sloth on the ground like set to horror music explore. It's awesome, it's awesome. I watched a lot of sloth videos. Well, there's a lot of good ones out there. I recommend looking up sloth fight.

Okay, I didn't see that. You'd think it'd be sad or disturbing, but there's a bunch of different videos and it's actually, it's in the grand sloth style. It's really cute when sloths fight. Yeah. Oh, bite or fight. Fight, fight.

Oh, gotcha. It's like they look like they're taking it seriously and they're all agitated, but it's impossible for us to take the sloth fight seriously. It's just too cute and they're just too incompetent at fighting. Oh dear. The three-toed guys,

they are very much more picky eaters and they eat generally these toxic leaves from just a few trees and they hang around like, if they find a good tree that they like, they will hang around that tree for a long, long time. Yeah, apparently they know that some three-toed sloths will inhabit the same tree for their whole life.

It's rare, it's unusual, but even still, I mean, their entire range usually doesn't extend over like 13 acres or five and a half hectares, right? Like it's a very small, limited area that a sloth, a three-toed sloth in particular will inhabit their whole life. All right, I think we can talk about the metabolism now

since we're eating. Oh yes, I'm so happy. I know what your effect of the show probably is, so just go ahead. There's like eight in here, at least true. So the reason sloths move so slowly is because in part, they metabolize so slowly. Like when you metabolize,

you're converting like food into energy, right? And you're doing all sorts of stuff with that. You're moving your muscles, you're walking, you're laughing, you're talking, you're recording a podcast, you're digesting food and sloths are mammals. So they do have this metabolism that's similar to any other mammal metabolism.

It's just way slower and therefore it's way weaker. Like the human metabolism puts out about 80 watts of energy at any given time. Sloths put out less than four watts. It's just extraordinarily slow. And even compared to humans or compared to other animals, they're same size. They metabolize things way more slowly.

So the reason that they move so slowly is because they literally don't have the energy to move much faster. Yeah, it takes a whole month to digest a meal. They have to do it that slow. If they would digest faster, it could poison themselves because they're eating these toxic leaves. They don't have incisors.

So they trim these leaves down, they smack their little lips together and trim these leaves down. And again, I hate to say the word cute again, but it's pretty adorable to see a little sloth chewing on a leaf. Yeah, but imagine you're a wounded bird and a toothless sloth is eating you to death.

Yeah, I imagine it's not a quick death. No, you get gummed to death. And I think the fact of the show probably is this whole farting business. Sure, take it. All right, well, here's the deal. They eat so slow that they don't even have gas that builds up in their system.

That is how slow they are digesting their food. So the gas just gets reabsorbed through the intestines and into the bloodstream. And it says here that the gas is then respired out of the lungs. Does that mean that they mouth fart or does it? Yeah, I mean, that's what I saw is that they have, yeah, they basically pass those same gases

that they normally would out of their fanny in the American sense, out of their mouth through breathing. Interesting. So yeah, I guess they mouth fart. Worst band name ever. That may be worse than Diarrhea Planet. I think you're right, man. It's better than, no,

it's actually worse than frozen poop knife too. They should do a joint tour. Yeah, you know that mouth fart's gonna be the opener always. They're never gonna make it to the headline. You boys are never headline. No. And I say boys because there's no way a girl band would be called mouth fart.

They're way too small for that. Mouth fart. So they also have a multi-chambered stomach, sort of like a cow which is really interesting because that's like a third of their body weight if their stomachs are full. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, like the reason why it's so much

of their body weight is because they digest food so slowly, they have to have this multi-chambered stomach to get as many nutrients as they possibly can out of it. And even still, like it's a really terrible evolutionary strategy to evolve as a strictly, is it herbivorous? As strictly tree dwelling herbivore. Like that's a really bad strategy

because you have to be small enough to exist in the tree, right? But at the same time, you have to be big enough to eat tons of leaves every day. Well, if not, because leaves don't give you, they're not very energy dense. So you have to eat a ton of them to get good energy. Well, the sloths evolved a different strategy.

They just slowed their metabolism down. So they can be small, but they don't have to eat that many leaves. And in fact, they can go for days without eating. And because they digest so slowly, they only poop about once a week. But to the central cog of this whole adaptation is having a big stomach that can very slowly digest

every possible nutrient out of the food that they eat. Yeah, so they do. They defecate and urinate once a week, generally in the same spot, kind of at the base of the tree. I don't think they like to wander too far because when they're on the ground, they are much more at risk than when they're up in their tree.

Yeah. They're super slow and they're at risk for attack, for whatever, any sort of larger mammal could come by and have a sloth lunch at any time. Right, right. In particular, the harpy eagle is like their main predator, but also, yeah, they're definitely vulnerable to ocelots and jaguars

and virtually any other predator in the jungle because they move so slowly and they have such an inability to defend themselves. But some researchers think that the reason sloths evolve to move so slowly is because it's a defense mechanism for them. That rather than like the howler monkeys that they share the jungle with,

when something comes along and gets the howler monkeys agitated, the howler monkeys scream and run around and try to escape the sloths. Right, the sloths who may be in the same tree as a howler monkey just stays motionless and silent. And so they camouflage in with the tree.

So that really slow movement is actually a defensive adaptation as well. Yeah, I think the sloth's defensive motto is nothing to see here. You're just like, we're just gonna be really still, let these monkeys take all the attention and no one will notice us. And that's kind of the idea.

Yeah, that's exactly the idea. And it works, it actually does work. And it's misleading, I think, to say, which means I accidentally misled everybody, that sloths have no recourse if they are found out. I saw at least one video where a harpy eagle found a sloth in a tree and lands right next to it. And the sloth just slowly lifts its arm up

and kind of swaps behind it with its claw at the harpy eagle. And the harpy eagle looked kind of puzzled, but it worked, like the harpy eagle left it alone. So, yeah, they can ward off danger, just not that frequently, actually. Yeah, and despite the fact that they move super slow and they are lazy,

they don't actually sleep as much as you would think. In captivity, they will sleep a lot longer because they have no predators around, no jaguars. And they understand that and they're like, all right, everything's cool, I can really dig in and sleep some. But out in the wild, they sleep a little under 10 hours, which is, I guess if you would have asked me beforehand,

I would have guessed 15 and up for sloth sleep. Well, they will in captivity, they sleep as much as 15 to 20 hours a day. But in the wild, they think, like you said, they got to be on point. And they're not stinky either, which is another great thing, even though you definitely don't want a sloth as a pet,

for reasons we'll talk about later. They don't smell, they smell kind of like the trees they live in, which is kind of great. And another defense mechanism. Yeah, so the reason that they smell like the trees that they live in is because sloths move so slowly that algae grows on them in their coat, in their fur.

Yeah, this is the other sort of amazing part. Like I had no idea. No, I didn't either. And I don't think researchers had much of an idea about this until recently. They knew that sloths got covered with green algae, especially during the rainy season. Normally they have like a tan or a brown colored coat.

But when it gets rainy in the tropical rainforest they live in, an algae like growth will build up on their coat. Which I mean, you try to grow some algae on you, you can't do it. I've tried. Even if you didn't take a shower, you move around too much.

You couldn't get any algae to grow on you. Sloths can. And at first they thought, haha, that's hilarious. Yet another funny fact about how slow sloths are. But as they've researched more deeply into it, they found that actually the sloth coat is an amazing ecosystem in itself on the sloth. And that whether it's intentional or not,

the sloth actually kind of cultivates a farm inside of its own coat that it uses to help feed itself too. Yeah, so I mean, I had seen pictures of these green tinted sloths and always kind of wonder what the deal was. It helps act as camouflage, which is super helpful. And I don't know, did you mention the groove

in the center of the hairs? No, haha. Yeah, so each hair has a little groove down the center and that's where the algae is allowed to grow. And obviously, because they're not moving fast, you're gonna get more of a chance to grow too. But like you said, they are a little ecosystem into themselves in that fur.

They did one study that found 980 beetles living on a single sloth. Just taking roosts in there and their little jungle coats. Right. And there's this moth species. This is crazy. The sloth moth, which is another great band name, by the way.

Yeah, sure. Cryptosis. Kolepe. Koloepi. Koloepi, I always say just the E. It's always OE. I think you're right. Yeah.

Koloepi. Koloepi, Koloepi, something like that. All right. Tomato, tomato. Cryptosis, Koloepi, dyer. And they actually colonize exclusively in sloth fur. Right, that's the only place you will find that type of moth is living in the fur of a sloth.

It's the sloth moth. Yeah, like totally symbiotic relationship. You know, they climbed down once a week to poop and these moths lay their eggs in that poop. And yes, they can actually lay their eggs in dingleberries, sloth dingleberries. Yeah, they do. Sure.

Everyone knows what that is, right? Do we need to explain that? I don't know. I would say look it up. Okay. I think that's as far as we need to say. So the adult moths emerge from this poop and they then say mama and they fly up

and take rest in the sloth's fur. Right, and then they mate and reproduce and then they lay eggs in the sloth poop and the circle of life continues. But again, this type of moth you won't find anywhere on earth except in the fur of a sloth. And then there's also beetles in there. And so as these things like grow and die

and decay and other plant matter and whatever's floating around in the air in the rainforest all kind of combine and get stuck into these grooves in the hair of the sloth fur. It forms this algae and they know that there is a relationship between the sloth moth and the algae in that the sloths that have the most moths

also have the most algae. And they figured out it's just basically this decaying matter. And they're like, okay, this is too weird camouflage. That kind of makes sense. But the fact that there's a moth that only lives in the sloth fur and the more of those moths are the more algae there is.

It's just too weird. And they tested this algae and they found that it's rich in fats. And for a very long time, they're like, okay, the metabolism kind of explains how a sloth could sustain itself. It's just, it burns so little energy that it can live on very, very nutrient sparse leaves.

But it's still kind of a mystery. It doesn't fully make sense. And they think they figured out that the sloth as it's grooming itself eats this algae, which is high in fats. And that that supplements its diet of leaves. And that that's really the combination of these leaves and this algae are what keep the sloth alive

over its lifetime. And in the meantime, their urine and their feces are fertilizing the tree that is their habitat. Right. Where these moths are also laying their eggs. So it's just like this really unique symbiosis going on between plant, animal and insect. Yeah.

And it seems to be doing great. Yeah. And one of the, I was like, well, you know, how much does that really help if the sloth is pooping at the base of the tree once a week? Does that really help? Sure.

And apparently it really does. It's not one of those. It is slow release. You just nailed it. So sloths are so slow, their poop actually slows down the decomposition in the tree because in the rainforest, decomposition happens so fast

that the tree is actually nutrient depleted because the decomp happens so fast. Sloth poop slows the whole process down and actually nurtures the tree even more. Yeah. It seems like everywhere the sloth goes, everyone just chills out. Yeah. Basically the sloth dingleberries are just little rainbows trailing out of its behind.

That's what sloths have. You have to look closely, but you'll see it. Sounds like a story my daughter would make up. So you do share a birthday. Yeah, we do. Hey, which is coming up actually probably right around the time this is released. Oh yeah.

Well, happy birthday Ruby. All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back and talk about sloth sex right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

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All right, Chuck, you promised it. You have to deliver sloth sex blow by blow. Go. So here's the deal. This is where things like, if you're like, all right, the sloth is the cutest thing and this is all adorable and they're just amazing. They are all those things. But this is when you might, I just want to prepare everyone to be slightly disappointed, maybe a little bit with the next couple of segments. Because first of all, sloths, you want to just think they, they sit around and just hug and love on each other all the time.

They're solitary creatures. They don't want to be around even other sloths. No, but, but this is something that, that you can have to kind of pick yourself back up after that devastating blow. Okay. In, in a square kilometer of rainforest, there might be something like 700 sloths. So they're close. So even though they're, yes, they're, they're very dense neighborhoods of basically shut in weirdos. Imagine that.

That's a sloth community. The most devastating thing is coming up later. I know you know what I'm talking about. Oh, yes. Oh boy. But the males like, let's say two sloths did find themselves on the same tree. They might get into a little fight. But more than likely they'll just, you know, one of them will leave and they'll go find their own tree and it might be a tree 10 or 15 feet away.

It sounds like, but it's their own. They look for new trees also when they're searching for a female partner, the males do. And they mate very quickly. It's, it lasts just a few seconds. And then the males leave the female. They don't have anything to do with the babies, which I looked up and I was like, surely they have some cute name like sloth babies. But they're just called sloth babies, which is cute, I guess. Yeah, that's pretty cute.

It's not bad. So, you know, you know, we were talking about fertilizing trees and everything when they come down and poop once a week. Yeah, I know where this is headed. So that was a big, that was a big mystery. Like why would you, if you're a sloth, it's coming down from a tree to poop uses up about 8% of your energy. That's a lot. Yeah. And it doesn't make any sense because it leaves you vulnerable to predation.

Some researchers say, we got to figure it out, they're leaving scent markers on the tree to signal to other sloths. Come on over here, I'm open to whatever freaky stuff you want to try, sloth friend. Yeah, anal secretions. So, like a male sloth will literally just say, I'm just going to rub my anus here and I'll meet you back there at 11 o'clock. At least a little rainbow trail. I guess so, the female can also, and I heard these, I looked up some videos on the female mating call or whatever, because they can also put out the call that they're ready. And it's described as a high-pitched scream here in this article, but it sounds sort of bird-like.

Like if I was in the jungle and I heard this, I would think it was a bird. Yeah, it's not sexy though. It's not sexy, it's animal. Did you get that reference or no? No, I didn't, but I appreciate you saying it was a reference. Beverly Hills Cop, Balkie. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This little cameo in Beverly Hills Cop.

He was one of the all-time greats. I never watched that TV show. I know you didn't, and Chuck, you're missing out. Remember, I keep going back to that piano-moving episode, and it was just one of the greatest pieces of physical comedy ever. Really? But yeah, also, and it wasn't just Balkie, like Balkie and Cousin Larry were really well cast. They were perfect foils. Seeing Cousin Larry get like his last bit of patience just break and his eyes get really big because Balkie did something, it was a beautiful thing to behold.

Cousin Larry was he the other guy, the main guy? Yeah, I see a DVD box set in your future. Were they actually cousins? In the show, yes, but not in real life. I mean, I don't know the setup at all. Is it that he has this wacky cousin from another land that all of a sudden shows up on his doorstep? Yeah, yeah, Balkie Bartokomus from, I can't remember. They say it a bunch of times, but he's like a central, southern-central European-type guy,

like from the Balkans or something like Latvia or something, and he comes over to America and he stays with his cousin Larry. I'll have to check it out. It's funny, all the great TV out that's mounting on a list. I'm like, I'll have to check out Perfect Strangers. Right, exactly. It's on my list. It should be high up. So the woman puts out the mating call.

The males, there may be competition for that lady who is in need, and if they do fight, they will fight upside down. And like you said, a sloth fight is, I guess, pretty cute as it turns out, right? It is cute. Yeah, it is cute. So yeah, the males will fight to the hurt, bruised ego, and then one of them will leave, and the male that remains will say, okay, give me a kiss, baby, and then they'll do it like a few times. Yeah. But it's really fast, apparently.

I have enough pride to not look up sloth sex, but from what I read, it happens very quickly, and then that's that. And like you said earlier, the male just kind of moves along, like, good luck with our children. And then the sloth gestation period depends on whether it's a two-toed or a three-toed sloth, but it's somewhere between six and 11 months, and then a sloth mom will give birth to one sloth baby at a time. Yeah, no letters. Nope, just one cute little baby. So here's where it gets devastating. They do nurse their young for a little while, but again, that takes a lot of energy to nurse a little baby.

So they only do that for a couple of weeks before they wean that baby onto solid food. The mommy is passing along all the information that the baby needs to know about what food is and how to hang and live in trees. And they do cling to their moms, which is super cute, for about six to 11 months. And then they are off on their own, although this is sort of cute. They do share a range with mom, and apparently will stay within a calling distance of one another. And this is all great, and I know I've set everyone up for a heartbreak. So here it goes. If a mommy sloth is up in a tree and baby sloth slips and falls down to the ground, mommy may just leave baby there.

Yeah. And that is like really hard for me to accept. I know. I know. Because a baby sloth is cute. Adult sloths are cute enough, but a baby sloth is just like eye bleach, right? So the idea of it just being like, well, sorry kid. Waiting to be eaten.

It was a great three months we had together, but I'm not going to put myself at risk of being vulnerable to some sort of predator. That's the deal, right? Yeah. That's what they think is that the baby's just not worth it to the sloth, which is really sad. I would understand that if there were sloth litters, if one of them fell off, or that they didn't bond, but they clearly do bond during the piggyback phase of the baby's development. So they think that it's just like it's just too much of a risk for the sloth, and the sloth says, better you than me, kid. Yeah.

This disturbed me because I was the same as you. Like if there was a litter, I get it. Or if they, like they're highly successful. So you would think that, you know, after a nine, you know, up to a year of gestation period, or if they pump babies out like every month or so, it wouldn't be a big deal. Right, right. But I don't know. It just seemed like it was worth that 8% energy and maybe a risk of panther feed, being panther feed.

Right. So I mean, I guess it would, if the baby falling happened to coincide with the mom having to poop at the base of the tree, maybe the baby has a chance then. I'm going to save you because I got to take a dump. Right. Oh man. So let's just go right past that because that is still super sad for me to think about. They do live for about 20 years in the wild, which is pretty good for a mammal,

anyone that slow and that, you know, seemingly defenseless. Yeah, that's the three toad. Yeah, the three toad. The two toads live about 12. In captivity though, they can live 30 and 40 years, including our old friend Missy at the Adelaide Zoo in Australia, who just died a couple of years ago at the old age of 43. From what I understand, she's the oldest known sloth to live.

And the fact that she did, she looked great up to the end, like Phyllis Diller. And the fact that sloths, life spans, double or triple in captivity really kind of says a lot about just how frequently they fall victim to predators. Like that's what kills sloths. It's not fighting with other sloths. It's not falling from trees. They can withstand that. It's being eaten by a predator, that's how sloths typically die.

So when you take them out of that situation, they tend to live very long. But like we were saying at the top of this episode, they're not necessarily happy. They get very stressed out when humans handle them and they can actually die from stress. They look happy, but they would much rather be at their home in Central and South America. For sure. They're really, really difficult to keep alive. Because remember, especially with the three-toed sloth, they're real picky eaters and they learn from their mothers what constitutes food.

And so whatever tree that their mom's been living in, basically that specific tree growing in a rainforest in South America, that is what constitutes food to the sloth. Not anything else you could possibly come up with. And so they'll starve in captivity pretty easily actually, especially if they're kept in captivity outside of Central or South America. Yeah. So if they do, let's say you're a wildlife management professional and you come upon a little baby sloth that has been dropped,

they will rescue that sloth if they can and try and rehabilitate it. But the goal is to get it back into the wild as soon as possible. Not like, oh, it's so cute. We're going to keep it around for a little while. I mean, there are clearly some in captivity, but it's not like a common zoo animal that you will see. Right. There was one other thing that was kind of a quirk of their metabolism.

So they're mammals, which means they're warm-blooded, but they're actually not really warm-blooded because they produce so little energy and heat through their metabolism. They actually use the same kinds of strategies that like snakes and lizards do where they use the sun to adjust their body temperature, which means that if it gets too hot, they can overheat and die. If it gets too cold, they can very easily freeze to death because their body temperature changes with the ambient temperature.

So that combined with the fact that their food comes from a single tree in Central America, that makes them really difficult to keep alive in captivity, which is why, like you were saying, they want to rehabilitate them back into the wild. That's the goal of it. Yeah, and while they are doing pretty well out there as far as their status goes, they are, of course, threatened in the sense that any animal in South America in the rainforest is threatened because of deforestation. It's just, you know, the sad fact all animals, even if they're doing well,

are going to be threatened if you're hacking through and leveling their habitat, like is what is going on pretty much. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's the biggest threat is deforestation. Although for the pygmy sloth that lives on Escudo Island off of the coast of Panama and nowhere else, because their habitat is so limited that any deforestation that happens there has put them in grave danger. But it's basically cutting down the forest and then building roads through the forest because sloths will go from tree to tree on the ground sometimes,

which means that when they encounter a road, it's hard to get from one tree to the other aside from on the ground. So a sloth crossing the road is probably not a good gamble for the sloth, but the more roads we build through the rainforest, the more sloths get hit by cars, which is about the saddest thing you could hit by a car or with a car. Yeah, and here's, you know, you always hear about like the movie Medicine Man, like the cure for cancer maybe in this one leaf in the middle of a forest somewhere in a jungle. They may not have the key to cancer in a sloth, but the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

did collect fungi samples, you know, the algae that grows in their fur. And this is of the three-toed sloth. And they found that some of these samples from the sloth coat help fight against malaria or the parasite that causes malaria and chagas disease, which I know we've talked about. It's another tropical parasitic disease. You can stop your heart. Mersa, cholera, salmonella. And they were also active against human breast cancer cells.

So pretty amazing. Yeah, which I mean, like that's the stuff that they found in the algae growing on sloth fur, which yeah, that is astounding. It's awesome. So we're all going to be chewing on sloths in the future. Well, yeah, don't say that. They'll be alive. You don't have to kill them or anything. Just gently suck on their fur.

Okay. Okay. You got anything else? I got nothing. Well, if you want to know more about sloths, there's a whole internet out there about them, although we did a pretty good job covering it, Chuck, if I do say so ourselves. I think so. Well, since I said internet, that means it's time for Listener Man.

I'm going to call this politics on your show. Hey guys, love the show. I've been listening for several years now and I've learned lots of good stuff. And you've also introduced me to the end of the world with Josh Clark and Movie Crush. Yeah. How about that? All right. Will goes deep.

And he says this, recently I was looking through reviews and comments on the show on Apple Podcasts. I saw a number of people making critical comments about how you share your opinions on religion and politics too often. I am a politically conservative and religious guy. And I want to encourage you to keep sharing your opinions. I live in a smallish Midwestern town in a red state where I grew up and spent most of my life. Most of the people in my orbit either go to church with me and my family or hold similar conservative views. Your opinions serve as an important function of bringing some alternative perspectives that sometimes challenge my opinions and encourage me to reevaluate certain positions and views.

Please keep interjecting your views, guys. Too many of us automatically dismiss any opinions and unfortunately people whose views contrast with their own. I used to work for an administrator who would frequently say, if we're all thinking the same thing, then some of us aren't thinking. That sounds like something. That's a really great thing. That's a great thing. A motivational poster.

That's the first album's title for Mouthfart's debut. Keep up the great work and keep offering your views along with your well research and fascinating topics. Well seasoned with witty humor and hilarious banter. Regards, Will. Well, that was a great, very nice, very kind email. Like, Will saw something, said, these guys probably know about this and I want to make sure that they know it's cool. So thanks, Will.

Awesome. That was much appreciated. If you like to join in with Will's course, we love that. I would also be interested to hear other people who want to write in and explain why we shouldn't share our politics or views because I'm very curious to hear the other side as well. Sure. This makes me a centrist. Fairness, Dr.

Right. You can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and find all of our social links there. And you can also send us a good old fashioned email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.