This Morning viewers are channelling their inner David Attenborough to check a wildlife “fact” after presenter Holly Willoughby recounted a strange theory about sloths during the show.
The presenter explained the fact to co-host Phillip Schofield in between fits of laughter, which prompted serious questioning.
She said: “I’m sure I’ve been told, we were frantically Googling it and apparently I’m wrong … if you turn a sloth up the right way it will explode.”
The moment reached more than 12,000 views on Twitter, and although several social media users found the moment hysterical, very few of them had the answer to Holly’s bizarre question.
So, do sloths “explode” if they are turned the right way up? It turns out the answer is a definite no.
Later in the show, Marcel McKinley, senior keeper at London Zoo, said over the phone: “I’m really sorry, Holly, they don’t (explode).
“Once a week they go down to the ground to go to the toilet, and they crawl around a bit, so if it happens they don’t explode.”
Sloths don’t pass wind like a lot of other animals, with their slow digestion meaning they only have to defecate once every three weeks. Gas is reabsorbed through the intestines into the bloodstream, and then respired out of the lungs.
If gases were left to accumulate in a sloth’s intestines, however, it could lead to the animal’s gut bursting.
It seems however that Holly was incorrect. Though sloths do spend most of their time hanging upside down, turning them the right way up certainly won’t make them explode.