MYSTERY OF WINTER SLEEP

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 119, 13 February 1926, Page 16

MYSTERY OF WINTER SLEEP

Nature has many interesting ways of providing for the survival of her children during the winter, and in Britain wc can find illustrations of all the different methods (writes T. C. Bridges in the "Daily Mail”). Some creatures, such as the fox and the rabbit, the rat and the hare, carry on as usual, for cveu in the worst of weather they can find food. Others, such as the bat, the dormouse, and the hedgehog, fall into a kind of torpor at the approach of cold weather, and usually remain in that condition until the spring. Hibernation, as it is called, is not sleep. It is a slate of suspended animation, a kind of trance. The bodily temperature of the animal falls to that of its refuge, and the creature hardly seems to breathe. You can seal a hibernating dormouse in a glass jar, yet it still survives. A torpid marmot has been immersed for four hours on end in poisonous gas, yet eventually awoke none the worse. A hibernating hedgehog has been placed for 20 minutes under water without harming it. Yet the life processes do continue, for the animal, which is fat as butter when it retires, is thin as a rail when it awakes in spring. All reptiles and snakes, _ including frogs and toads, become torpid in cold weather.

Some animals, such as the red squirrel, sleep only during the coldest weather. The badger sleeps for most of the winter, deep in its inaccessible earth, yet like the squirrel, rouses at intervals to move about and feed. Even the dormouse, a very sound sleeper, wakes occasionally nnd visits its store of seeds.

Hibernation is still a good deal of a mystery. All hibernators do not retire or rouse at the same time, and members of the same species vary greatly in their habits of winter sleep. Tn the colder parts of North America the skunk sleeps all the winter, but further south does not hibernate at all.