Saturday 31 March 2018

Birds don’t fart, neither do sloths, and other secrets of #DoesItFart

For the bolson pupfish, a good fart can be a lifesaver: These little fish live in shallow pools in Mexico where they slurp algae off of rocks and burrow into the sediment to hide from predators. When temperatures rise in the summer, the algae squirt out gas bubbles that the pupfish suck down when they eat — making them bloated, and, worse, buoyant.

The puffed-up pupfish float back to the water’s surface where they’re easy pickings for predators. But that’s not even the worst part: if they don’t fart in time, “sometimes, it’s so bad that they explode,” says Dani Rabaiotti, a zoology graduate student at University College London.

These pupfish are among the 80 different animals that Rabaiotti, her co-author Nicholas Caruso, a...

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