The Secret of the Hibernators

Hibernation is one of nature’s great puzzles. How do animals do it? For half the year, actually half their lives, they lay cold and lifeless in a hole in the ground and are none the worse for wear. Yet, when we human beings are laid up in a cast for just three weeks then our leg muscles start to become thin and weak. On her journey through the hidden world of hibernation, biologist and researcher Lisa Warnecke tells the story of four animals she has observed during their “winter sleep” on four different continents often under adventurous circumstances: a hedgehog in a major German city, a lemur in tropical Madagascar, a bat in the arctic desert of the Canadian prairie, and a small marsupial in sunny Australia. Her book clears up a lot of widespread misconceptions, such as the presumption that the animals are asleep the whole time, that they lay there motionless the entire time, or that hibernation only happens in cold climates. There are animals that will begin to hibernate even when the temperature is a cozy 85 degrees. They conserve an astonishing 99 percent of their energy by doing so. Hibernation is a success story for the conservation of species. Dr. Lisa Warnecke was born in 1978 in Frankfurt am Main and holds a Ph.D. in biology. She worked on a species conservation project on the west coast of Australia and she researched the hibernation pattern of diseased bats in Winnipeg, Canada. Today, she lives in Hamburg and researches the ecophysiology of hedgehogs in the urban environment.