To avoid the harsh temperatures and lack of food that come with colder weather, some animals migrate. Others hibernate. But the pikas of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in northwestern China do neither.

Pikas are pint-size, rodent-like mammals that look like a cross between a guinea pig and a rabbit. Of the 29 species worldwide, the American pika, native to the western United States and Canada, is well known for the way it collects plants in its mouth before stashing the food stockpiles underground to endure the winter.

But how its Asian relative, the plateau pika, survives on dry, wind-whipped steppes, where temperatures routinely dip to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 29 degrees Celsius) and plants shrivel in the winter, has long