How Do Squirrels Deal With Cold? They May Not Feel It Like Us
At least two hibernating mammals have quirks in their central nervous system that allow them to shrug off the chill.
Do hibernating animals get cold?
It might seem like a simple question, but scientists have long wondered exactly how bears, bats, snakes, and many other creatures can wait out the winter without freezing to death.
According to a new study, that may be because hibernating animals don’t feel winter’s chill in the same way that we do.
“If you expose mouse or human neurons to cold, they start to fire ... like crazy,” says senior author Elena Gracheva, a neurophysiologist at Yale University School of Medicine. (Read how hibernating bears keep weirdly warm.)
But when Gracheva and her colleagues exposed hibernators like the 13-lined ground squirrel and the Syrian hamster to low temperatures in the lab, they saw very little activity in
