October 11, 2016 • 45 mins
When animals are faced with scarce food in the winter, they have two choices to stay alive: migrate or hibernate. For hibernators, their bodies undergo some mind-boggling physiological changes in the coldest months. Could humans ever do it too?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know Frondhouse stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, and Jerry. So this is Stuff you Should
Know the podcast. Can I start off with a request
(00:21):
of advice? Agrest of advice some advice which is in
the form of a request M This sounds a passive
aggressive No it's not. It's to our listeners. We often
get people that say, hey, um, I'm years behind. I'm
writing you about the episode from two thousand eight, two
thousand nine. Uh, And we love it when people go
(00:43):
back and listen to all the podcasts in order, right,
But what really helps us out is if you want
to start at the beginning and also listen to the
most recent episode. Does that work? Yeah? I call it sandwiching.
Oh really, that's the term for yeah, you started. If
you want to start at the beginning, that's great. But
(01:03):
it also really helps us out if you listen to
the most recent one. And um, so I just want
to throw it out there. You know, we don't want
to tell you how to listen. I see what you're doing.
This is just a request or or you could just
go buy yourself a two thousand and twelve camera. That's
very true, right, but it does help us. And you know,
if you really don't want to do that, of course,
listen how you want. But um, it's good for us
(01:25):
that the most recent episodes get listened to. And um,
I think it's kind of cool then because you you
can flash forward through time and see how bad we
were then and how bad we are now and just
compare off a little little different thing. Yeah yeah, alright,
well put man, Yeah, just a p s A. Appreciate that.
That's good. P s A. How's your Facebook page? Wait
(01:49):
a minute, just occurred to me. Though people aren't listening
to this recent one anyway, then they're not gonna not
to do Maybe the people they live with, who sandwich,
We'll tell them, Hey man, yeah, you should be doing
in a different way. I didn't think that through. But
what did you ask me? I asked how your Facebook
pages going? Oh, Charles W Chuck Bryant, Yes, it's going
(02:09):
well good. I'm on there a little bit and uh,
putting an insider stuff like occasionally even say what we
are recording that day, which is, oh yeah, we've usually
not we guarded that with like Fort Knox, But occasionally
I'll throw that out there. Yeah, that's good. And then
other stuff, you know, insider heads up on performances and
(02:30):
ticket sales, you know, dog and cat pictures. That's what
I'm doing. I've got my own Twitter account to josh
um Clark. Yeah, and where can they find you? On Facebook?
Same same place. I don't even bother Okay, just go
to Twitter, all right here the Facebook guy? Sure, what's yours?
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Yeah, it's like behind the scenes
(02:51):
or just other stuff, you know, things that strike your fancy. Yeah,
that's a lot of admin and stuff for us today. Yeah.
Do you want to do administrative details right now while
we're at it? Nope, you want to talk about hibernation.
So Charles Chuck, if you will. Um, right now, you're
sitting there, you're thinking, you're moving your papers around, looking
(03:11):
up and down, breathing, hearts beating at uh. You're got
an eye on Jerry Um eating her fritos, eating her Freedo's.
Jerry is burning a lot of energy too, but she's
also taking it in. And all of this energy expenditure
requires a ton of energy input, and in fact, we
(03:33):
humans in particular, are not really great at um at
energy conversion. Right. We lose like six of the energy
if we break down glucoast into c O two and
I think a t P and a TPS like this
really powerful molecule that powers ourselves. When we do that,
we lose like six of that potential energy to heat
(03:53):
a waste, you'd think so, but it turns out we
have evolved the channel that waste into keeping our bodies warm,
which makes us warm blooded. Right. The thing is is
we have something really important and maybe one of the
most overlooked important technologies humans ever came up with clothing,
which allows us to live outside of our normal habitat,
(04:16):
which is the tropics and subtropical areas. That's why we
spread about the earth exactly thanks to clothing, in large
part in shoes to a lesser But that's part of
clothing any important extent. Sure, but it depends on who
you asking. Isn't it accessory? But if we if we
were warm blooded animals that didn't have clothing and had
(04:37):
kind of spread out into colder climbs, one strategy that
we might have when it got really cold and food
became scarce therefore the energy input was a lot harder
to come by. Might be hibernation, that's right, which is
something some animals do. That's right. Uh, it's funny. I
(04:57):
think a lot of people think of bears and mediately
when they think of hibernation, um. But not only do
a lot of animals hibernate um bears. If you want
to get technical, let's get technical technical. Oh boy, that'll
be in the brain forever now. Um. Technically, bears do
(05:19):
not hibernate. Um. We are going to call it hibernation.
And a lot of people do. Say. You know, any
animal that undergoes a period sustained period of like a
body temperature drop and metabolism change, um is high hibernation.
And that's what I think. But technically the real um.
(05:41):
You know, if you get a pedantic biologist up in
your grill, they might um push the glasses back on
their nose and say that it's when the temperature is
significantly decreased long term state. This is a sixty biologist
you're doing. Metabolism slows drastically, and the the will energy
coma like condition that takes some time to recover from. Uh.
(06:04):
And bears are a little different because they aren't really
in that coma like state. You can wake them up
pretty easily. You should not their temperature, y, Yeah, I
think that's important to be right. Hey, you hybernating bear, um,
and the body temperature of the bears don't drop very
much compared to some other animals. But yeah, for our
(06:27):
intents and purposes, as we're going to dig into the
whole thing. When we say hibernation, we mean anytime an
animal UM goes into this kind of state beyond sleep,
with the goal of surviving a rough period of the year. Yeah,
whether it's a shortage of food or whether um and
it could be cold. Usually associate hibernation with you know,
(06:49):
winter time, but actually, in the tropics there's something called estivation,
which is hibernation during the hottest or driest times of
the year. Pretty cool. Never knew that. Um. There are
also reptiles who hibernate. It's called broomation and um. There's
also torpor, which is a great word this is that's
(07:09):
another confusing term though. Torpor can mean um. It can
be an umbrella term for any hibernation strategy, right, or
it can refer to a specific type of hibernation that's usually, Um,
it happens on a daily basis, like a few hours maybe,
And so like you're hearing all this, chuck, I can.
(07:31):
I can put myself in the mind of people listening.
They're like, you guys are talking about sleep, your dummies,
it's called sleep. This is not sleep actually no, uh.
And that's very important to point out because I think
if you don't know about hibernation, like I probably used
to think, yeah, bears go sleepy time for half the year,
(07:52):
It's like none of that is correct at all. So um,
it's it's very different from sleep. Sleep is uh. When
you hibernate, you're really going on undergoing some pretty drastic
physiological physiological changes. When you sleep, you undergo a little
bit of a change, Like even when we sleep, our
heart rate slows a bit, body temperature drops a little bit. Yeah,
(08:14):
breathing slows a little bit, but nothing, it's not anything
drastic at all. It's more of a mental change, right. Yeah,
that's the big difference between sleep and hibernation. With sleep,
your brain is taking time to rest. Even though there
are plenty of phases of sleep where your brain is active,
it's also very inactive for large parts of it with hibernation. Apparently,
(08:34):
when an animal is in even deep hibernation, its brain
is still um reflecting the same type of waves I
believe alpha waves that has when it's wakeful, that they're
just somewhat suppressed. And actually when when animals come out
of hibernation, they apparently have sleep deprivation and have to
sleep for several days afterwards. Yeah, that's the fact of
(08:55):
the show for me. Oh yeah, yeah, like sorry for
taking out no, no no, no, You'll wake up from a
six month hibernation like I'm sleepy. Yeah, I gotta get
some reths from laying around like this for six months.
But it's all because of those brain waves. I think
it's pretty interesting. Um, if you're in a zoo, you
probably don't hibernate. I'm not talking about a guest and
(09:20):
visitor at a zoo. If you're an animal living in
a zoo, you probably don't hibernate because you're they're regulating
your environment. Your food is not going to be scarce.
But in order sometimes to give these animals a more
natural life cycle, they will trigger hibernational purpose. Yeah, they're
just like blast them with an ice ray or something.
(09:41):
An ice ray yeah. Uh, and as far as when
to hibernate, like when it all depends on the animal,
on when they do it, and it depends on the
animal and how it's triggered, like when they know to
do it. Yeah. Yeah, So there's actually there's a biologist
whose name was Jurgen ash Off and uh dr ash
(10:02):
Off assuming doctor sounds like a bad Bond villain, almost
um or an actor playing a Bond villain. Um dr
ash Off came up with a term for all the
different kinds of triggers that can trigger hibernation and sleepy
triggs zeit geiber. Does that make sense to you because
(10:25):
you're in a German so zeit means um uh. Right,
So this, this wonderful term um is probably does mean
in German sleepy time triggers. It's a good German band
name too, yeah, but the yeah because there's not a
third word. The third word. The three word band names
(10:48):
bothered me. They're really tough to pull off, and when
they are pulled off, well great, they're usually done very well.
But it's also really easy to fumble a three word
band name. I'm trying to of three word band names now,
like Bachman Turner, Overdrive. Yeah, great one. Brian Jonestown Massacre,
great one. Fleetwood Big Mac. I'll bet there's a cover
(11:11):
band out there named that. Actually just saw a Fleetwood
Mac cover band. Where were they called? I don't go
to those tribute cover bands ever, but um, he just
came to in the middle of one. No. I noticed
there was a Smith's cover band playing and they were
opening up for rumors. They're from Atlanta. Actually, the Fleetwood
Mac one and uh, the Smiths one was tough. I
(11:32):
had a hard time watching the guy. I mean, the
band was great and he sounded good, but what was
the problem. He was morrisying around the stage and you
can't morris see around the stage unless you're Morrissey. So
I just had to kind of look at the guitar
player and Johnny Marring on the stage. Now, he was fine.
But Fleetwood Mac rumors they are great, dude, I mean
(11:55):
unbelievably great, really, And if you like Fleetwood Mac and
you don't want to pay two hundred dollars to go
see them, they go see rumors that huh. I mean
he sounded just like them anyway, shout out to rumors.
I guess so I might be on a new cover
band kick though, So I found myself kind of perusing
like what's coming in Atlanta, thinking like, yeah, that was
(12:18):
kind of fun, right, who's coming? Soo? So are they coming? No?
But there's uh a night of that of it with
a C. D. C. Van Halen and one other like
classic rock band is going to be all playing together,
I think featuring the real Sammy Hagar. Maybe you never
know in Michael Anthony too, although my hat's off to
(12:40):
Sammy Hagar for stepping up to defend Michael Anthony like
a year or so ago. Oh I thought you're gonna
say hats off to him for not driving well too, Yeah,
he did take up for Michael Anthony. All right, So
we're talking about Zeke geiber and again this is all
the ways that like hibernation could be triggered. And I
think you said temperature is like the big one, right,
(13:02):
that's the main, most common one. We talked a little
bit about food supplies there. I mean there are many
animals who are triggered by food supplies, birds most notably um,
although there's only one bird that goes into true hibernation.
Oh yeah, yeah, chicken. Now the common poor will actually
(13:22):
goes into like real hibernation from like five months, and
other birds just have a torqu port like you were saying,
a few hours a day. It's all they need to
conserve a little bit energy. Yeah, and I mean again,
that's the point, like you're trying to save calories, right, Yeah,
it's that's the whole point exactly. Um. So there's also
(13:43):
something called photo period where the days start getting shorter
and it triggers um a hibernation response in animals too. Yeah.
And a really cool thing that this article pointed out
was that they've done experiments where they've had animals in
uh I was about to say, and capture locked away
(14:05):
room studying animals that have no triggers like this going on,
and they have this weird ability they don't understand, triggered
by their circannual rhythm where they just know this like
internal biological clock where they just know it's time. Pretty amazing,
It is amazing. And that's in contrast of the circadian
rhythm which we all know and love that makes us
(14:26):
sleepy when the day ends. That's right, Um, let's let's
take a break man, all right, are you ready? Yeah,
I'm gonna go listen to some Fleetwood Big Mac. You know, Josh,
(14:50):
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it beautiful, all right, Tucka. We were talking about um
ways that animals know, and like you said, they just
(15:56):
seemed to know naturally when the go hibernate um and
when they start getting these these triggers, they're like, oh,
it's starting to be time. Um. One of the first
things they do is prepare a place to stay. They
fluff the pillow, check out the sleeping bag. What else.
(16:19):
If they're the hair Bear Bunch, they just basically settle
into their awesome den. Do you remember them, the hair
bear the Hairbear Bunch early seventies. They lived in a zoo,
but they had like the coolest They had, like a
TV and like a like great recliners and a barbridgerator. Sure, yeah,
the hair Bear Bunch. You remember the um the bear
(16:43):
with like the cravat and like the big afro. One
of them had like a camouflage hat that covered his eyes,
like the guy from Cypress Hill. No, I don't remember
that at all, Chuck, you gotta check out the hair
Bear Bunch. I think you might like them. That was
my generation too. Yeah, that was right there. Interesting maybe,
and my parents didn't let me watch it. They're like
that that bears obviously on the dope who knows, uh,
(17:07):
But you are correct. They prepare their little area depends
on the animal on what they do. Might be a cave,
a little ground squirrel or a lemur might um dig
out their den and put some insulating material around it.
We talked about polar bears. Yeah, the polar bear. Mom's
kind of combine hibernation and um birth right. They dig
(17:30):
out like a snowden, which again great movie. Uh. Sometimes
they don't dig out a big area. Sometimes they'll just
find a little tree hollow, a little shallow cave, and
they're kind of partially exposed to the weather. Yeah, because
I was thinking about that. When you think of bears hybriding,
and you think of a bear hybriding in a cave,
they couldn't be too far into the cave because the
(17:53):
same triggers that that put them to sleep and and
trigger hybernation, um, also bring them out of it. Sure,
so they would make sense that they would need to
be like partially exposed to the weather. Yeah. You know,
so as the days started to get longer they would
wake up, or as the temperature got warmer, they would
they would kind of come out of it. And think
about that. Um. Food storage is a big deal. Um.
(18:16):
Sometimes if it's non perishable foods, you can actually keep
it in there with you. Uh. And we bring this
up because, UM, it's a bit of a misconception that
the animals, some animals do knock out for months and
months at a time, but some will wake up occasionally
just to shove some food in their mouth and then
go back to sleep, well, not sleep, go back into
(18:36):
hibernation mode. So they should have some food in there.
Or maybe they've just eaten so much prepared fattened up
for the winter months that they don't need to eat
at all. I saw somewhere that some bears um go
for meeting in an average of eight thousand calories a
day to twenty calories a day to fatten up in
(18:59):
like the weeks leading up to to hibernation. So we
talk about brown fat now, I guess, yeah, it sounds gross.
It's delicious, though. Brown fat is different than white fat
when we typically process fat um for for energy and
heat it. Uh, there's there's something called shivering that it
(19:19):
facilitates that helps us well, yeah, shivering shivering right, yeah, yeah,
just muscle contraction burns energy and releases heat. Yeah, but
brown fat is great because we don't need to shiver it. Actually,
the brown fat is oxidized directly and it instantly produces
the heat. It's gives the whole middle part, so you
(19:40):
don't need to shiver. It doesn't waste energy on muscle contraction,
not at all. That's it's called non shivering thermogenesis. Nice.
So that's why you want the brown fat. Yeah, and
that's what the bears bulk up with. I guess, I
guess all animals do, or maybe not all animals, but
an it's handy. Well, when you do have to burn
(20:03):
that fat, whether it's brown fat or otherwise, um, you
you use up a lot of that stored energy because
fat is a great energy store, right. Um. And if
you're a pretty large animal, you if you let your
body temperature get too low, because again most of the
(20:25):
time this is in very very cold climates in the winter,
right if you, if we if you let your body
temperature to get too low, it's gonna take a lot
of energy to get it back to its normal warm
blooded state, even even it's normal hibernating temperature. So animals
have astoundingly something called a set point, and it's like
(20:45):
an internal thermostat setting that says, when my body temperature
gets to this this temperature, burn some fat and warm
me back up. And uh, I guess all warm blooded
animals have this set point, right, Yeah, but for the
larger animals it's higher because again it requires so much
(21:06):
energy to to to restore it that their body temperature
never gets too low and their set point is being
activated pretty frequently during hibernation. But if you're a much
smaller animal, I think the Arctic ground squirrel is like
the best example of of hibernation, especially in this respect.
The Arctic ground squirrel a warm blooded animal. Their body
(21:27):
temperature will get below freezing during hibernation and you would think, well,
you know, that's got to be pretty terrible for him. Yes,
it is. They lose bone density, they lose their teeth,
their brain actually they lose like parts of it, and um,
they come very close to dying or being dead. And
(21:49):
then the thaw comes and they are they're they're aroused
from their hibernation and all of a sudden they start
growing all that stuff back. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. Yeah, Like, oh,
I just want to say, move right. Well, I go
through that every year. All this is controlled mostly by
the endocrine system. Uh, and we have these glands in
(22:11):
our body that alter all these hormones and it can
really control with great precision all these physiological changes that
they need to go through. Yeah, I say, we but yeah,
I'm an animal too, I guess yeah, party animal. Uh
should we talk about some of the uh specifics of that? Right?
So um and again like this is the reason why
(22:34):
things like temperature changes and um, the changes in the
amount of sunlight during any given day can trigger hibernation
because those are capable of affecting hormones. Right. That's right.
So you're picking up things like um, like when to
grow your coat, it triggers melatonin production, which triggers a
thick coat like coat thickening. Yeah. Right, your pituitary gland
(22:58):
is gonna control that fat old up the heart rate
and the breathing rate and metabolic functions. That's a big one.
Intuitary gland takes care of a lot. Oh yeah, you
lose that, you probably can't hibernate. Uh. Thyroid m that's
gonna control your metabolism somewhat and your levels of activity. Right.
And then finally, insulin, as we all know, is gonna
(23:19):
regulate your glucose. Right. There's also something that was isolated.
It's an opioid called datal d a d l e
UM and they found that it lowers heart rate and
um respiration in animals and that if you give any
animal this, they kind of start to get into hibernation mode.
So it's not like I don't think it's a hormone,
(23:41):
it's a chemical, but it has like a hibernating effect
on animals. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So some of these
changes can be pretty drastic. The heart rate can drop
to as little as two and a half percent um
a chipmunk, for example, five beats per minute as opposed
to two d that's pretty significant. Let's to the bat.
Some some species of bat go from a thousand beats
(24:04):
per minutes and they only breathe once every two hours, amazing.
And the box turtle doesn't breathe at all. It completely
shuts down breathing. But I mean that makes sense. Like
when you are when you're running off of stored fat, right, Yeah,
you you don't have the need to power cells like normal.
(24:25):
Your hybrid and your metabolism is slowed because your cells
aren't requiring the same energy that they have before, which
means that you don't need oxygen or nearly as much oxygen,
so you don't have to breathe as much. And since
you're not taking in that much oxygen, your your blood
doesn't need to pump nearly as much either, because that's
the point of the heart and your blood is to
(24:46):
spread oxygen through your body at least in last part. Uh,
and the turtle, the box turtle takes an air through
the skin, So like you said, it still needs the oxygen,
but just said need to breathe to get it right,
And it doesn't need much because the box tirtroles heartbeats
about every once every ten minutes. Man. That's then two
(25:07):
minutes later boo boom, alright, pretty amazing. Um. And then uh,
most animals, probably all animals that go into any sort
of deep hibernation, they have like x amount of fat
stored up that they that should carry them through the winter. Right. Um,
that's why you should never ever mess with a hibernating
(25:30):
animal of any type because you will basically have killed
it if you rouse it from its hibernation. It will
take a tremendous amount of energy to to come back
to wakefulness right and to bring that temperature up right.
And so it just spent way more than its budget
for um for the winter. So even if it can
get back into hibernation, it'll starve to death because it
(25:53):
used up a bunch because you some jerk woke it
up from its hibernation. Why did you do that? I
didn't do it. I'm just saying, uh, waste If you're wondering, Um,
I know, we kind of gave it away a little
bit in the Polar Bear episode about the poop and peepee. Um,
some or most animals that go into deep hibernation don't
(26:13):
do either one. Uh, there is no poopoo because they're
not eating. Um all that all that food has been
digested already and turn into fat. Yeah, so there's nothing
going through the intestines at all, which must be a
wonderful feeling. Oh yeah, you know when you empty outrook good.
But the body does produce urea no matter what, and
that's the waste product in urine and hibernating animals actually
(26:37):
recycle that. Bears in particular, break it down into amino
acids and use it. And if you think, well, they're
not drinking, how are they not dehydrated? That comes from
fat too. Pretty unreal, it really is. Yeah, this whole
thing is just like it's unbelievable that animals uh evolved
to do this to survive, you know. Yeah, but I
(26:58):
mean it makes uttering plete sense. It's like the food
supply dried it up for five months. Well, then just
go to sleep, don't eat any food, and again they're
not sleeping. Yeah, it's really tough to avoid that, I know.
But just go hibernate. Yeah, I think we point about
that earlier. We mentioned estivation, which is hibernation and hot weather.
(27:21):
This is something I did not know existed until the
last few days. Yeah, Um, in the desert. If you
live in the desert or a tropical climate and it
gets too hot, or if the food is getting low,
you may not be able to survive unless you dig
a hole and dig down into the earth where it's
cooler and more more stable temperature down there. Or if
(27:42):
you are a fish or a primitive fish that has
lungs like a long fish, um, you may live in
an area where the your body of water dries up annually.
This is a good reason to estivate too, right, So
long fish actually um produce mucus. They create a mucous
(28:04):
sack around themselves that dries on the inside but stays wet.
No dries on the outside, stays wet on the inside. Yeah,
they're like down in the mud, right, um. But the
lake can completely dry out around them and they still
stay hydrated and um, they don't dry out. They're lungfish, though,
(28:24):
so they breathe through long so they have like a one.
They also make a tube of mucus nbelievable that reaches
into the air, so they can breathe while they're sequestered
away and that's good eating too. I I don't know lungfish. Yeah,
those are. Maybe we're related to those. We're both tetrapods.
(28:45):
Did you know that, Uh, we're related to the lungfish.
I don't think I did know that, although it makes
sense because they you know, they're the only fish I
think that breathes that way, right, I believe so. But
they're also, um, probably one of the first fish to
start to come out of water and produce what became amphibians.
(29:07):
I just had to look up a lung fish real quick.
You've seen it before. Yeah, it looks sort of like
an eel a little. But they have like foot like
appendages almost. Yeah, interesting, just like us. I have a
foot like appendage. You can do two of them. Uh.
So we talked a little bit about torpor with birds.
The black capped chickadee has a daily torpor that it
(29:30):
undergoes for a few hours and like we said, it
just that's all. It needs, just a few degrees lower
in their body, just for a few hours a day
to conserve that little bit of energy that it needs.
Uh and only that poor will will. Um, they have
a drop and energy needs the poor will does. And
then back in the spring when things warm up, the
(29:52):
poor will needs about seven hours to stretch it out.
Seven wait, seven hours of torpor, No, seven hours of
getting back to north speed again after they wake up
from hibernation. Because a lot of animals it takes a
long time. But this, this little bird needs about seven hours.
And he's like, all right, let's do this. I'm up
and at him exactly. He's like that guy from Jerry McGuire,
(30:16):
which guy, remember, the guy who like had like the
interstitial interviews. He was like, every morning I wake up
and put my hand, yeah, let's go. Yeah, you know
they Cameron Crow tried to get Billy Wilder for that role.
And there's a great story that he told because he
just revered Billy Wilder. Billy Wilder, the great filmmaker and writer,
(30:38):
directed The Apartment among others and Boulevard too, m M,
I don't know about that. Maybe. Uh So Billy Wilder
said no, and Cameron Crows like please, like this would
really be awesome, and he said no. So Tom Cruise
was like, let me, uh come to the next meeting
and ask him, because I'm Tom curt right. So the
(31:01):
Cruise rolls in there and asked Billy Wilder and he
says no. And Cameron Crow how he put it was
I could tell from the look on Tom's face that
no was an word he heard often. And that's stuck
with me all these years that Tom Cruise was uh
told no by Billy Wilder and was just like what
(31:21):
his smiling didn't change, is like the entire change took
place in the light in his eyes. Pretty funny. Billy
Wilder did direct Sunset Boulevard by the way he did.
Um all right. And hummingbirds we should mention because those
little dudes and d debts are very active, as you know.
Have you ever seen them flitter around? Uh? They in
order to do that, they have a heart rate up
(31:42):
to twelve hundred beats per minute. So when you see
the hummingbird and it looks like they're going like all
over the place they are. It's not just their wings,
Like they're in a constant state of high heart rate. Uh.
And their consumption is so great that they used daily
tour poor even in there in the tropics, Like every
hummingbird you know has a daily torpor where they um,
(32:07):
and I think it's like more torpoor than other birds even, Right,
So it has nothing to do with weather in their case,
there's juiced up. So if uh, if this whole idea
of hibernation is like a really kind of ancient mechanism, right,
and we're all connected far back into the tree of life,
(32:28):
it raises the question, are can humans conceivably hybernate? Right?
And that's a it's it's not just us asking that,
that's right. So let's stick a break and we'll talk
about that right after this. M h alright, Josh, can
(33:07):
humans hybernate? Uh? Probably not. Well, it's a pretty controversial
thing because there are some scientists that say, absolutely, we
have this latent ability that we could tap into, and
then other scientists say absolutely not. Asleep. Yeah, Um, we
(33:28):
did a whole episode on therapeutic hypothermia that touched on
a lot of this and actually NASA's got a contract
with the company from here in Atlanta called space Works,
and space Works has something called rhino chill where they
introduce chilled liquids up your nose to cool the base
(33:50):
of your brain. That's where you lose me. Well, yes,
well you would lose consciousness, right, And apparently it slows
metabolism and induces like a hybrid ation like state, and
they're looking into it to see if they can use
it for long distance space travel, like a trip to
Mars or something like the exactly like in the movies. Um,
NASA is very much looking into this kind of thing
(34:12):
and apparently has been since the fifties since the movie.
Said they basically, yeah, um, but this idea of entering
hibernation or it's also frequently called suspended animation, that kind
of thing, Um, it would help tremendously, Yeah, because not
only would you save people from like the boredom of
a six month space trip, you'd save them from going
(34:34):
a little crazy from that. Save on food supplies, save
on space because the people don't need to move around
or exercise or anything. I guess it's slowing their aging
as well, right, because I don't know that'd be the
interesting thing. I would guess, so, yeah, because I would
think the process of aging is the wearing out of
your body from metabolism. And if your metabolism slowing, you're
(34:57):
not aging. Sure, yeah, probably, I'm sure didn't shut it down.
But andantee, there's a formula, you know, so there is
I mean, there is actual interest in this kind of thing. Um,
you found a cool thing from the British Medical Journal.
Uh from geez, how long a d? Ten years ago? Yeah,
on the nose hundred sixteen years ago. It was an
(35:19):
article titled human hibernation and they reprinted it about sixteen
years ago and they talked about these Russians peasants that
did something called lutska. I think you nailed there, which
is essentially, um, six months during the hardest winters, the
(35:41):
family will kind of hibernate, like they don't do anything.
They sleep as much as they can, eat a little
hard tech, drink a little water, and someone stays up
to keep the fire going. They you know, take turns
doing that. But otherwise they are just bedded down conserving
their energy. Yeah, that's it. They wake up once a day,
Like you said, a little bread pick, a little water
go back to sleep. Imagine that's gotta like I'm sure
(36:05):
it's not so drastic like some of these mammals that
we've talked about, but it's got to have a physiological effect,
the desired effect. I mean, think about it. That's why
they tell you if you're trying to lose weight, don't
eat for hours before you go to bed, because all
you're gonna do is just you're you're not gonna burn
any of that energy off because you're just laying there sleeping.
(36:26):
Same thing with this, I mean they're there. It's kind
of like a forced pseudo hibernation, self induced pseudo hibernation
that they're like, we're it's a strategy. We're not going
to use up as much um energy. We're just gonna
lay here. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. And I think these
survival shows that you see to um they do a
(36:47):
lot of laying around when the food is scarce as well. Yeah,
I mean it's that's what you want to do. Yeah, Plus,
but I think you're kind of forced to su yeah,
because you lose energy. Yeah, you have no food energy,
so you're, yeah, you can't do any thing. There's one
other thing I wanted to mention too, you got something else? No,
I mean, just you know, I remember a few years ago,
(37:07):
I guess it was ten years ago now, I remember
when that Japanese man was lost in the woods and
claims that in some scientists agree that he went into
a state of hibernation. Yeah, we talked about him in
the Therapeutic Hypothermia episode. Yeah. I think we might have
done one of our old video things on him too.
Oh yeah, it seems like it man a while ago.
We've covered everything, dude. But there's been other cases like that, Yeah,
(37:29):
from people like stranded in cars. Uh, Swedish biologists who like, yeah,
for all intensive purposes, drowning an icy creek was revived.
That's yeah. I guess that's a little more like the
therapeutic hypothermia huh. But no, the same thing with the
Japanese man and the woman in the trunk of the car.
They were both exposed to below freezing temperatures and it
(37:51):
lowered their metabolism pretty amazing. And then there was this
guy who was not in freezing temperatures. Back in nineteen
seventy three, there was a journal article I can't remember
the name of the journal um that they did a
study with a Yogi Yogi Satya Murky and for eight
days he went into like a state of basically like
(38:11):
meditative hibernation as far as they don't. He didn't need
or drink anything. Um, he lost ten pounds four and
a half KOs. His body temperature dropped down to ninety
four degrees, which doesn't seem that much, but apparently that
was the ambient temperature of where he was sealed often.
And um, they had an e KG. They had e
(38:33):
KG sensors detecting his heartbeat, and apparently his heartbeat went
up to like two beats a minute and then started
to taper off. And after like the first day and
for the next seven days they basically couldn't detect a heartbeat.
He like lowered his heartbeat so much. And um, I
haven't seen I've seen it mentioned here there or whatever,
(38:54):
but I've not seen anybody say, well, this is how
he did it, or this is the trick. Um. It
seems to be one of those weird curiosities of science
that it's just kind of over there, you know what
I mean. I think I remember that. I'm like, that's incredible.
When I was a kid. No, oh yeah, remember that show.
I think I remember a piece on this dude. I
(39:15):
wouldn't be surprised if they did. You have his name,
Yogi Sachi Murty, different guy. There was another Yogi though
on that show, Yogi Bearra. No, he could do the
same thing right there on the bench. Da dugout? Uh?
Do we should we talk about the hydrogen sulfide real quick?
There's a cell biologist named Mark Roth at the Fred
(39:36):
Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and cl and UM. In two
thousand five, there was a big experiment where uh, scientists
induced hibernation and lab mice by giving them h hydrogen
sulfide gas and apparently it shut down there. It really
induced hibernation, the body temperature, shut down their metabolic processes,
(39:59):
and then they gave them normal air and then they
were fine again. And they're thinking they're they're trying it
now on roundworms, which apparently we have the same reaction
humans do. What's it called nitrogen sulfide The effect? Oh yeah,
it's like that initial not it's kind of like, you know,
gas somebody and it knocks them out. Uh. And they're
doing experiments that they think that might be the key
(40:22):
to inducing this in humans, whether for space travel or
I think what was one of the other things they
said it would be good for is um oregan transplants, right,
that's it, And by that I meant Oregon, not Oregon transplants. Yeah,
and people moving from northern California. Um. I think they
(40:42):
mentioned something too about people in vegetative states. Uh, they
could help them out if they're if they kind of
shut their metabolic functioning down while they wait for a
cure or something. I'm not sure. The thing I saw
about the that gas was that if you main exposed
to it, you die, which I guess is like some
(41:04):
sort of like inert gas asphyxiation. But it seemed different
than that, Like, I don't know why that would mean
that it showed promise for hibernation. Maybe if, like you,
you expose somebody to it and then let off a
little bit, and then expose them to it and let
off that you could keep it up like that. Yea,
like a good dentist. We'll go, we'll go run our
(41:24):
own experiments after this. If you want to know more
about hibernation, you can tape that word in the search
bar and they'll bring up this article, which is a
grabster article. Oh, that's right, yeah, marcro quality. Uh. And
since I said grabs there, it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this wine growing. Hey, guys, enjoyed the
(41:46):
episode on ice ages and commend you on your ability
to once again distill a complicated subject into an informative
entertainment piece. That's what we do. As a quick note
from the wine industry, we often and I often personally
prefer the term wine growing. You broke you both chuckled
at the phrase in the episode, but actually conveys the
(42:07):
job better than anything else. Grapes grown for wine are
generally different varieties held to different standards than grapes grown
for eating or juice production. Berries are smaller, contain less juice,
more acid and sugar, and have bitter skins and seeds,
which make them less appetizing than the grapes you find
in the supermarket. The piece are the qualities that make
good wine. In fact, many professional associations in the wine
(42:29):
industry refer to themselves as wine growers. Unfortunately, the vines
don't grow and finished bottles wine is made there in
the vineyard, though the goal is to bring out the
best in the fruit once it is inside the winery.
I keep up the good work. I encourage you to
try some of the wines from around Delanaga, Georgia. Great
wine is made everywhere. You may be surprised. What is
just down the road, Steve, Steve, Steve, send us some wine. Yeah, man,
(42:52):
that's how we try some wine. I'm in the wine industry.
Go try someone send us some wine. Yes, Steve, I
like big beefy red full bodied reds, dry whites. What
do you like? I love Rose's, Okay, I like uh reds.
I guess fruity reds like z Infandel's and Sara's um
and uh, I'm cool with any white's red champagne to Steve,
(43:17):
or any kind of sparkling wine I should say. Yeah.
I recommend to you and others out there to watch
this great documentary. Did you see PSALM, the original s
O M M documentary about the Somalia Master Somalia testing process.
It was good. Uh. There's a sequel now from the
same makers called Some Inside the Bottle, where it's just
(43:39):
a look at wine. There are ten different topics they
cover about the wine in the wine industry, and it's
really really good. I'll check that one up. Yeah, you
can learn a lot from it. Okay, it'll make you thirsty.
We need to do a whole episode on wine. We
still have yet to do. Yeah. Emily asked me that
when we were watching it, She's like, have you not
done this yet? And I said, that's one I might
(44:00):
be most afraid of. Period. Oh yeah, worse than soccer
chess what we did soccer and chess. I'm more intimidated
by the wine podcast because it cares so much about
it and you could do a you could have a
podcast series on wine would be yeah, there are plenty
so it would be tough to sum it up. Do this.
(44:23):
We'll do it. We're doing wine, all right, it'll be great, Chuck,
you'll love it so scared. Uh. If you want to
get in touch with us again, you can hang out
with me on Twitter at Josh Underscore, UM Underscore Clark.
You can also hang out with Stuff you Should Know
in general at s Y s K podcast. You can
hang out with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
(44:45):
You can hang out with Stuff you Should Know on
Facebook at Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know UM.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
how stuff Works dot com uh and, as always, hang
out with us at our home on the web Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
(45:06):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know Frondhouse stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, and Jerry. So this is Stuff you Should
Know the podcast. Can I start off with a request
(00:21):
of advice? Agrest of advice some advice which is in
the form of a request M This sounds a passive
aggressive No it's not. It's to our listeners. We often
get people that say, hey, um, I'm years behind. I'm
writing you about the episode from two thousand eight, two
thousand nine. Uh, And we love it when people go
(00:43):
back and listen to all the podcasts in order, right,
But what really helps us out is if you want
to start at the beginning and also listen to the
most recent episode. Does that work? Yeah? I call it sandwiching.
Oh really, that's the term for yeah, you started. If
you want to start at the beginning, that's great. But
(01:03):
it also really helps us out if you listen to
the most recent one. And um, so I just want
to throw it out there. You know, we don't want
to tell you how to listen. I see what you're doing.
This is just a request or or you could just
go buy yourself a two thousand and twelve camera. That's
very true, right, but it does help us. And you know,
if you really don't want to do that, of course,
listen how you want. But um, it's good for us
(01:25):
that the most recent episodes get listened to. And um,
I think it's kind of cool then because you you
can flash forward through time and see how bad we
were then and how bad we are now and just
compare off a little little different thing. Yeah yeah, alright,
well put man, Yeah, just a p s A. Appreciate that.
That's good. P s A. How's your Facebook page? Wait
(01:49):
a minute, just occurred to me. Though people aren't listening
to this recent one anyway, then they're not gonna not
to do Maybe the people they live with, who sandwich,
We'll tell them, Hey man, yeah, you should be doing
in a different way. I didn't think that through. But
what did you ask me? I asked how your Facebook
pages going? Oh, Charles W Chuck Bryant, Yes, it's going
(02:09):
well good. I'm on there a little bit and uh,
putting an insider stuff like occasionally even say what we
are recording that day, which is, oh yeah, we've usually
not we guarded that with like Fort Knox, But occasionally
I'll throw that out there. Yeah, that's good. And then
other stuff, you know, insider heads up on performances and
(02:30):
ticket sales, you know, dog and cat pictures. That's what
I'm doing. I've got my own Twitter account to josh
um Clark. Yeah, and where can they find you? On Facebook?
Same same place. I don't even bother Okay, just go
to Twitter, all right here the Facebook guy? Sure, what's yours?
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Yeah, it's like behind the scenes
(02:51):
or just other stuff, you know, things that strike your fancy. Yeah,
that's a lot of admin and stuff for us today. Yeah.
Do you want to do administrative details right now while
we're at it? Nope, you want to talk about hibernation.
So Charles Chuck, if you will. Um, right now, you're
sitting there, you're thinking, you're moving your papers around, looking
(03:11):
up and down, breathing, hearts beating at uh. You're got
an eye on Jerry Um eating her fritos, eating her Freedo's.
Jerry is burning a lot of energy too, but she's
also taking it in. And all of this energy expenditure
requires a ton of energy input, and in fact, we
(03:33):
humans in particular, are not really great at um at
energy conversion. Right. We lose like six of the energy
if we break down glucoast into c O two and
I think a t P and a TPS like this
really powerful molecule that powers ourselves. When we do that,
we lose like six of that potential energy to heat
(03:53):
a waste, you'd think so, but it turns out we
have evolved the channel that waste into keeping our bodies warm,
which makes us warm blooded. Right. The thing is is
we have something really important and maybe one of the
most overlooked important technologies humans ever came up with clothing,
which allows us to live outside of our normal habitat,
(04:16):
which is the tropics and subtropical areas. That's why we
spread about the earth exactly thanks to clothing, in large
part in shoes to a lesser But that's part of
clothing any important extent. Sure, but it depends on who
you asking. Isn't it accessory? But if we if we
were warm blooded animals that didn't have clothing and had
(04:37):
kind of spread out into colder climbs, one strategy that
we might have when it got really cold and food
became scarce therefore the energy input was a lot harder
to come by. Might be hibernation, that's right, which is
something some animals do. That's right. Uh, it's funny. I
(04:57):
think a lot of people think of bears and mediately
when they think of hibernation, um. But not only do
a lot of animals hibernate um bears. If you want
to get technical, let's get technical technical. Oh boy, that'll
be in the brain forever now. Um. Technically, bears do
(05:19):
not hibernate. Um. We are going to call it hibernation.
And a lot of people do. Say. You know, any
animal that undergoes a period sustained period of like a
body temperature drop and metabolism change, um is high hibernation.
And that's what I think. But technically the real um.
(05:41):
You know, if you get a pedantic biologist up in
your grill, they might um push the glasses back on
their nose and say that it's when the temperature is
significantly decreased long term state. This is a sixty biologist
you're doing. Metabolism slows drastically, and the the will energy
coma like condition that takes some time to recover from. Uh.
(06:04):
And bears are a little different because they aren't really
in that coma like state. You can wake them up
pretty easily. You should not their temperature, y, Yeah, I
think that's important to be right. Hey, you hybernating bear, um,
and the body temperature of the bears don't drop very
much compared to some other animals. But yeah, for our
(06:27):
intents and purposes, as we're going to dig into the
whole thing. When we say hibernation, we mean anytime an
animal UM goes into this kind of state beyond sleep,
with the goal of surviving a rough period of the year. Yeah,
whether it's a shortage of food or whether um and
it could be cold. Usually associate hibernation with you know,
(06:49):
winter time, but actually, in the tropics there's something called estivation,
which is hibernation during the hottest or driest times of
the year. Pretty cool. Never knew that. Um. There are
also reptiles who hibernate. It's called broomation and um. There's
also torpor, which is a great word this is that's
(07:09):
another confusing term though. Torpor can mean um. It can
be an umbrella term for any hibernation strategy, right, or
it can refer to a specific type of hibernation that's usually, Um,
it happens on a daily basis, like a few hours maybe,
And so like you're hearing all this, chuck, I can.
(07:31):
I can put myself in the mind of people listening.
They're like, you guys are talking about sleep, your dummies,
it's called sleep. This is not sleep actually no, uh.
And that's very important to point out because I think
if you don't know about hibernation, like I probably used
to think, yeah, bears go sleepy time for half the year,
(07:52):
It's like none of that is correct at all. So um,
it's it's very different from sleep. Sleep is uh. When
you hibernate, you're really going on undergoing some pretty drastic
physiological physiological changes. When you sleep, you undergo a little
bit of a change, Like even when we sleep, our
heart rate slows a bit, body temperature drops a little bit. Yeah,
(08:14):
breathing slows a little bit, but nothing, it's not anything
drastic at all. It's more of a mental change, right. Yeah,
that's the big difference between sleep and hibernation. With sleep,
your brain is taking time to rest. Even though there
are plenty of phases of sleep where your brain is active,
it's also very inactive for large parts of it with hibernation. Apparently,
(08:34):
when an animal is in even deep hibernation, its brain
is still um reflecting the same type of waves I
believe alpha waves that has when it's wakeful, that they're
just somewhat suppressed. And actually when when animals come out
of hibernation, they apparently have sleep deprivation and have to
sleep for several days afterwards. Yeah, that's the fact of
(08:55):
the show for me. Oh yeah, yeah, like sorry for
taking out no, no no, no, You'll wake up from a
six month hibernation like I'm sleepy. Yeah, I gotta get
some reths from laying around like this for six months.
But it's all because of those brain waves. I think
it's pretty interesting. Um, if you're in a zoo, you
probably don't hibernate. I'm not talking about a guest and
(09:20):
visitor at a zoo. If you're an animal living in
a zoo, you probably don't hibernate because you're they're regulating
your environment. Your food is not going to be scarce.
But in order sometimes to give these animals a more
natural life cycle, they will trigger hibernational purpose. Yeah, they're
just like blast them with an ice ray or something.
(09:41):
An ice ray yeah. Uh, and as far as when
to hibernate, like when it all depends on the animal,
on when they do it, and it depends on the
animal and how it's triggered, like when they know to
do it. Yeah. Yeah, So there's actually there's a biologist
whose name was Jurgen ash Off and uh dr ash
(10:02):
Off assuming doctor sounds like a bad Bond villain, almost
um or an actor playing a Bond villain. Um dr
ash Off came up with a term for all the
different kinds of triggers that can trigger hibernation and sleepy
triggs zeit geiber. Does that make sense to you because
(10:25):
you're in a German so zeit means um uh. Right,
So this, this wonderful term um is probably does mean
in German sleepy time triggers. It's a good German band
name too, yeah, but the yeah because there's not a
third word. The third word. The three word band names
(10:48):
bothered me. They're really tough to pull off, and when
they are pulled off, well great, they're usually done very well.
But it's also really easy to fumble a three word
band name. I'm trying to of three word band names now,
like Bachman Turner, Overdrive. Yeah, great one. Brian Jonestown Massacre,
great one. Fleetwood Big Mac. I'll bet there's a cover
(11:11):
band out there named that. Actually just saw a Fleetwood
Mac cover band. Where were they called? I don't go
to those tribute cover bands ever, but um, he just
came to in the middle of one. No. I noticed
there was a Smith's cover band playing and they were
opening up for rumors. They're from Atlanta. Actually, the Fleetwood
Mac one and uh, the Smiths one was tough. I
(11:32):
had a hard time watching the guy. I mean, the
band was great and he sounded good, but what was
the problem. He was morrisying around the stage and you
can't morris see around the stage unless you're Morrissey. So
I just had to kind of look at the guitar
player and Johnny Marring on the stage. Now, he was fine.
But Fleetwood Mac rumors they are great, dude, I mean
(11:55):
unbelievably great, really, And if you like Fleetwood Mac and
you don't want to pay two hundred dollars to go
see them, they go see rumors that huh. I mean
he sounded just like them anyway, shout out to rumors.
I guess so I might be on a new cover
band kick though, So I found myself kind of perusing
like what's coming in Atlanta, thinking like, yeah, that was
(12:18):
kind of fun, right, who's coming? Soo? So are they coming? No?
But there's uh a night of that of it with
a C. D. C. Van Halen and one other like
classic rock band is going to be all playing together,
I think featuring the real Sammy Hagar. Maybe you never
know in Michael Anthony too, although my hat's off to
(12:40):
Sammy Hagar for stepping up to defend Michael Anthony like
a year or so ago. Oh I thought you're gonna
say hats off to him for not driving well too, Yeah,
he did take up for Michael Anthony. All right, So
we're talking about Zeke geiber and again this is all
the ways that like hibernation could be triggered. And I
think you said temperature is like the big one, right,
(13:02):
that's the main, most common one. We talked a little
bit about food supplies there. I mean there are many
animals who are triggered by food supplies, birds most notably um,
although there's only one bird that goes into true hibernation.
Oh yeah, yeah, chicken. Now the common poor will actually
(13:22):
goes into like real hibernation from like five months, and
other birds just have a torqu port like you were saying,
a few hours a day. It's all they need to
conserve a little bit energy. Yeah, and I mean again,
that's the point, like you're trying to save calories, right, Yeah,
it's that's the whole point exactly. Um. So there's also
(13:43):
something called photo period where the days start getting shorter
and it triggers um a hibernation response in animals too. Yeah.
And a really cool thing that this article pointed out
was that they've done experiments where they've had animals in
uh I was about to say, and capture locked away
(14:05):
room studying animals that have no triggers like this going on,
and they have this weird ability they don't understand, triggered
by their circannual rhythm where they just know this like
internal biological clock where they just know it's time. Pretty amazing,
It is amazing. And that's in contrast of the circadian
rhythm which we all know and love that makes us
(14:26):
sleepy when the day ends. That's right, Um, let's let's
take a break man, all right, are you ready? Yeah,
I'm gonna go listen to some Fleetwood Big Mac. You know, Josh,
(14:50):
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(15:34):
first purchase. Google and square Space. Make it professional, make
it beautiful, all right, Tucka. We were talking about um
ways that animals know, and like you said, they just
(15:56):
seemed to know naturally when the go hibernate um and
when they start getting these these triggers, they're like, oh,
it's starting to be time. Um. One of the first
things they do is prepare a place to stay. They
fluff the pillow, check out the sleeping bag. What else.
(16:19):
If they're the hair Bear Bunch, they just basically settle
into their awesome den. Do you remember them, the hair
bear the Hairbear Bunch early seventies. They lived in a zoo,
but they had like the coolest They had, like a
TV and like a like great recliners and a barbridgerator. Sure, yeah,
the hair Bear Bunch. You remember the um the bear
(16:43):
with like the cravat and like the big afro. One
of them had like a camouflage hat that covered his eyes,
like the guy from Cypress Hill. No, I don't remember
that at all, Chuck, you gotta check out the hair
Bear Bunch. I think you might like them. That was
my generation too. Yeah, that was right there. Interesting maybe,
and my parents didn't let me watch it. They're like
that that bears obviously on the dope who knows, uh,
(17:07):
But you are correct. They prepare their little area depends
on the animal on what they do. Might be a cave,
a little ground squirrel or a lemur might um dig
out their den and put some insulating material around it.
We talked about polar bears. Yeah, the polar bear. Mom's
kind of combine hibernation and um birth right. They dig
(17:30):
out like a snowden, which again great movie. Uh. Sometimes
they don't dig out a big area. Sometimes they'll just
find a little tree hollow, a little shallow cave, and
they're kind of partially exposed to the weather. Yeah, because
I was thinking about that. When you think of bears hybriding,
and you think of a bear hybriding in a cave,
they couldn't be too far into the cave because the
(17:53):
same triggers that that put them to sleep and and
trigger hybernation, um, also bring them out of it. Sure,
so they would make sense that they would need to
be like partially exposed to the weather. Yeah. You know,
so as the days started to get longer they would
wake up, or as the temperature got warmer, they would
they would kind of come out of it. And think
about that. Um. Food storage is a big deal. Um.
(18:16):
Sometimes if it's non perishable foods, you can actually keep
it in there with you. Uh. And we bring this
up because, UM, it's a bit of a misconception that
the animals, some animals do knock out for months and
months at a time, but some will wake up occasionally
just to shove some food in their mouth and then
go back to sleep, well, not sleep, go back into
(18:36):
hibernation mode. So they should have some food in there.
Or maybe they've just eaten so much prepared fattened up
for the winter months that they don't need to eat
at all. I saw somewhere that some bears um go
for meeting in an average of eight thousand calories a
day to twenty calories a day to fatten up in
(18:59):
like the weeks leading up to to hibernation. So we
talk about brown fat now, I guess, yeah, it sounds gross.
It's delicious, though. Brown fat is different than white fat
when we typically process fat um for for energy and
heat it. Uh, there's there's something called shivering that it
(19:19):
facilitates that helps us well, yeah, shivering shivering right, yeah, yeah,
just muscle contraction burns energy and releases heat. Yeah, but
brown fat is great because we don't need to shiver it. Actually,
the brown fat is oxidized directly and it instantly produces
the heat. It's gives the whole middle part, so you
(19:40):
don't need to shiver. It doesn't waste energy on muscle contraction,
not at all. That's it's called non shivering thermogenesis. Nice.
So that's why you want the brown fat. Yeah, and
that's what the bears bulk up with. I guess, I
guess all animals do, or maybe not all animals, but
an it's handy. Well, when you do have to burn
(20:03):
that fat, whether it's brown fat or otherwise, um, you
you use up a lot of that stored energy because
fat is a great energy store, right. Um. And if
you're a pretty large animal, you if you let your
body temperature get too low, because again most of the
(20:25):
time this is in very very cold climates in the winter,
right if you, if we if you let your body
temperature to get too low, it's gonna take a lot
of energy to get it back to its normal warm
blooded state, even even it's normal hibernating temperature. So animals
have astoundingly something called a set point, and it's like
(20:45):
an internal thermostat setting that says, when my body temperature
gets to this this temperature, burn some fat and warm
me back up. And uh, I guess all warm blooded
animals have this set point, right, Yeah, but for the
larger animals it's higher because again it requires so much
(21:06):
energy to to to restore it that their body temperature
never gets too low and their set point is being
activated pretty frequently during hibernation. But if you're a much
smaller animal, I think the Arctic ground squirrel is like
the best example of of hibernation, especially in this respect.
The Arctic ground squirrel a warm blooded animal. Their body
(21:27):
temperature will get below freezing during hibernation and you would think, well,
you know, that's got to be pretty terrible for him. Yes,
it is. They lose bone density, they lose their teeth,
their brain actually they lose like parts of it, and um,
they come very close to dying or being dead. And
(21:49):
then the thaw comes and they are they're they're aroused
from their hibernation and all of a sudden they start
growing all that stuff back. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. Yeah, Like, oh,
I just want to say, move right. Well, I go
through that every year. All this is controlled mostly by
the endocrine system. Uh, and we have these glands in
(22:11):
our body that alter all these hormones and it can
really control with great precision all these physiological changes that
they need to go through. Yeah, I say, we but yeah,
I'm an animal too, I guess yeah, party animal. Uh
should we talk about some of the uh specifics of that? Right?
So um and again like this is the reason why
(22:34):
things like temperature changes and um, the changes in the
amount of sunlight during any given day can trigger hibernation
because those are capable of affecting hormones. Right. That's right.
So you're picking up things like um, like when to
grow your coat, it triggers melatonin production, which triggers a
thick coat like coat thickening. Yeah. Right, your pituitary gland
(22:58):
is gonna control that fat old up the heart rate
and the breathing rate and metabolic functions. That's a big one.
Intuitary gland takes care of a lot. Oh yeah, you
lose that, you probably can't hibernate. Uh. Thyroid m that's
gonna control your metabolism somewhat and your levels of activity. Right.
And then finally, insulin, as we all know, is gonna
(23:19):
regulate your glucose. Right. There's also something that was isolated.
It's an opioid called datal d a d l e
UM and they found that it lowers heart rate and
um respiration in animals and that if you give any
animal this, they kind of start to get into hibernation mode.
So it's not like I don't think it's a hormone,
(23:41):
it's a chemical, but it has like a hibernating effect
on animals. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So some of these
changes can be pretty drastic. The heart rate can drop
to as little as two and a half percent um
a chipmunk, for example, five beats per minute as opposed
to two d that's pretty significant. Let's to the bat.
Some some species of bat go from a thousand beats
(24:04):
per minutes and they only breathe once every two hours, amazing.
And the box turtle doesn't breathe at all. It completely
shuts down breathing. But I mean that makes sense. Like
when you are when you're running off of stored fat, right, Yeah,
you you don't have the need to power cells like normal.
(24:25):
Your hybrid and your metabolism is slowed because your cells
aren't requiring the same energy that they have before, which
means that you don't need oxygen or nearly as much oxygen,
so you don't have to breathe as much. And since
you're not taking in that much oxygen, your your blood
doesn't need to pump nearly as much either, because that's
the point of the heart and your blood is to
(24:46):
spread oxygen through your body at least in last part. Uh,
and the turtle, the box turtle takes an air through
the skin, So like you said, it still needs the oxygen,
but just said need to breathe to get it right,
And it doesn't need much because the box tirtroles heartbeats
about every once every ten minutes. Man. That's then two
(25:07):
minutes later boo boom, alright, pretty amazing. Um. And then uh,
most animals, probably all animals that go into any sort
of deep hibernation, they have like x amount of fat
stored up that they that should carry them through the winter. Right. Um,
that's why you should never ever mess with a hibernating
(25:30):
animal of any type because you will basically have killed
it if you rouse it from its hibernation. It will
take a tremendous amount of energy to to come back
to wakefulness right and to bring that temperature up right.
And so it just spent way more than its budget
for um for the winter. So even if it can
get back into hibernation, it'll starve to death because it
(25:53):
used up a bunch because you some jerk woke it
up from its hibernation. Why did you do that? I
didn't do it. I'm just saying, uh, waste If you're wondering, Um,
I know, we kind of gave it away a little
bit in the Polar Bear episode about the poop and peepee. Um,
some or most animals that go into deep hibernation don't
(26:13):
do either one. Uh, there is no poopoo because they're
not eating. Um all that all that food has been
digested already and turn into fat. Yeah, so there's nothing
going through the intestines at all, which must be a
wonderful feeling. Oh yeah, you know when you empty outrook good.
But the body does produce urea no matter what, and
that's the waste product in urine and hibernating animals actually
(26:37):
recycle that. Bears in particular, break it down into amino
acids and use it. And if you think, well, they're
not drinking, how are they not dehydrated? That comes from
fat too. Pretty unreal, it really is. Yeah, this whole
thing is just like it's unbelievable that animals uh evolved
to do this to survive, you know. Yeah, but I
(26:58):
mean it makes uttering plete sense. It's like the food
supply dried it up for five months. Well, then just
go to sleep, don't eat any food, and again they're
not sleeping. Yeah, it's really tough to avoid that, I know.
But just go hibernate. Yeah, I think we point about
that earlier. We mentioned estivation, which is hibernation and hot weather.
(27:21):
This is something I did not know existed until the
last few days. Yeah, Um, in the desert. If you
live in the desert or a tropical climate and it
gets too hot, or if the food is getting low,
you may not be able to survive unless you dig
a hole and dig down into the earth where it's
cooler and more more stable temperature down there. Or if
(27:42):
you are a fish or a primitive fish that has
lungs like a long fish, um, you may live in
an area where the your body of water dries up annually.
This is a good reason to estivate too, right, So
long fish actually um produce mucus. They create a mucous
(28:04):
sack around themselves that dries on the inside but stays wet.
No dries on the outside, stays wet on the inside. Yeah,
they're like down in the mud, right, um. But the
lake can completely dry out around them and they still
stay hydrated and um, they don't dry out. They're lungfish, though,
(28:24):
so they breathe through long so they have like a one.
They also make a tube of mucus nbelievable that reaches
into the air, so they can breathe while they're sequestered
away and that's good eating too. I I don't know lungfish. Yeah,
those are. Maybe we're related to those. We're both tetrapods.
(28:45):
Did you know that, Uh, we're related to the lungfish.
I don't think I did know that, although it makes
sense because they you know, they're the only fish I
think that breathes that way, right, I believe so. But
they're also, um, probably one of the first fish to
start to come out of water and produce what became amphibians.
(29:07):
I just had to look up a lung fish real quick.
You've seen it before. Yeah, it looks sort of like
an eel a little. But they have like foot like
appendages almost. Yeah, interesting, just like us. I have a
foot like appendage. You can do two of them. Uh.
So we talked a little bit about torpor with birds.
The black capped chickadee has a daily torpor that it
(29:30):
undergoes for a few hours and like we said, it
just that's all. It needs, just a few degrees lower
in their body, just for a few hours a day
to conserve that little bit of energy that it needs.
Uh and only that poor will will. Um, they have
a drop and energy needs the poor will does. And
then back in the spring when things warm up, the
(29:52):
poor will needs about seven hours to stretch it out.
Seven wait, seven hours of torpor, No, seven hours of
getting back to north speed again after they wake up
from hibernation. Because a lot of animals it takes a
long time. But this, this little bird needs about seven hours.
And he's like, all right, let's do this. I'm up
and at him exactly. He's like that guy from Jerry McGuire,
(30:16):
which guy, remember, the guy who like had like the
interstitial interviews. He was like, every morning I wake up
and put my hand, yeah, let's go. Yeah, you know
they Cameron Crow tried to get Billy Wilder for that role.
And there's a great story that he told because he
just revered Billy Wilder. Billy Wilder, the great filmmaker and writer,
(30:38):
directed The Apartment among others and Boulevard too, m M,
I don't know about that. Maybe. Uh So Billy Wilder
said no, and Cameron Crows like please, like this would
really be awesome, and he said no. So Tom Cruise
was like, let me, uh come to the next meeting
and ask him, because I'm Tom curt right. So the
(31:01):
Cruise rolls in there and asked Billy Wilder and he
says no. And Cameron Crow how he put it was
I could tell from the look on Tom's face that
no was an word he heard often. And that's stuck
with me all these years that Tom Cruise was uh
told no by Billy Wilder and was just like what
(31:21):
his smiling didn't change, is like the entire change took
place in the light in his eyes. Pretty funny. Billy
Wilder did direct Sunset Boulevard by the way he did.
Um all right. And hummingbirds we should mention because those
little dudes and d debts are very active, as you know.
Have you ever seen them flitter around? Uh? They in
order to do that, they have a heart rate up
(31:42):
to twelve hundred beats per minute. So when you see
the hummingbird and it looks like they're going like all
over the place they are. It's not just their wings,
Like they're in a constant state of high heart rate. Uh.
And their consumption is so great that they used daily
tour poor even in there in the tropics, Like every
hummingbird you know has a daily torpor where they um,
(32:07):
and I think it's like more torpoor than other birds even, Right,
So it has nothing to do with weather in their case,
there's juiced up. So if uh, if this whole idea
of hibernation is like a really kind of ancient mechanism, right,
and we're all connected far back into the tree of life,
(32:28):
it raises the question, are can humans conceivably hybernate? Right?
And that's a it's it's not just us asking that,
that's right. So let's stick a break and we'll talk
about that right after this. M h alright, Josh, can
(33:07):
humans hybernate? Uh? Probably not. Well, it's a pretty controversial
thing because there are some scientists that say, absolutely, we
have this latent ability that we could tap into, and
then other scientists say absolutely not. Asleep. Yeah, Um, we
(33:28):
did a whole episode on therapeutic hypothermia that touched on
a lot of this and actually NASA's got a contract
with the company from here in Atlanta called space Works,
and space Works has something called rhino chill where they
introduce chilled liquids up your nose to cool the base
(33:50):
of your brain. That's where you lose me. Well, yes,
well you would lose consciousness, right, And apparently it slows
metabolism and induces like a hybrid ation like state, and
they're looking into it to see if they can use
it for long distance space travel, like a trip to
Mars or something like the exactly like in the movies. Um,
NASA is very much looking into this kind of thing
(34:12):
and apparently has been since the fifties since the movie.
Said they basically, yeah, um, but this idea of entering
hibernation or it's also frequently called suspended animation, that kind
of thing, Um, it would help tremendously, Yeah, because not
only would you save people from like the boredom of
a six month space trip, you'd save them from going
(34:34):
a little crazy from that. Save on food supplies, save
on space because the people don't need to move around
or exercise or anything. I guess it's slowing their aging
as well, right, because I don't know that'd be the
interesting thing. I would guess, so, yeah, because I would
think the process of aging is the wearing out of
your body from metabolism. And if your metabolism slowing, you're
(34:57):
not aging. Sure, yeah, probably, I'm sure didn't shut it down.
But andantee, there's a formula, you know, so there is
I mean, there is actual interest in this kind of thing. Um,
you found a cool thing from the British Medical Journal.
Uh from geez, how long a d? Ten years ago? Yeah,
on the nose hundred sixteen years ago. It was an
(35:19):
article titled human hibernation and they reprinted it about sixteen
years ago and they talked about these Russians peasants that
did something called lutska. I think you nailed there, which
is essentially, um, six months during the hardest winters, the
(35:41):
family will kind of hibernate, like they don't do anything.
They sleep as much as they can, eat a little
hard tech, drink a little water, and someone stays up
to keep the fire going. They you know, take turns
doing that. But otherwise they are just bedded down conserving
their energy. Yeah, that's it. They wake up once a day,
Like you said, a little bread pick, a little water
go back to sleep. Imagine that's gotta like I'm sure
(36:05):
it's not so drastic like some of these mammals that
we've talked about, but it's got to have a physiological effect,
the desired effect. I mean, think about it. That's why
they tell you if you're trying to lose weight, don't
eat for hours before you go to bed, because all
you're gonna do is just you're you're not gonna burn
any of that energy off because you're just laying there sleeping.
(36:26):
Same thing with this, I mean they're there. It's kind
of like a forced pseudo hibernation, self induced pseudo hibernation
that they're like, we're it's a strategy. We're not going
to use up as much um energy. We're just gonna
lay here. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. And I think these
survival shows that you see to um they do a
(36:47):
lot of laying around when the food is scarce as well. Yeah,
I mean it's that's what you want to do. Yeah, Plus,
but I think you're kind of forced to su yeah,
because you lose energy. Yeah, you have no food energy,
so you're, yeah, you can't do any thing. There's one
other thing I wanted to mention too, you got something else? No,
I mean, just you know, I remember a few years ago,
(37:07):
I guess it was ten years ago now, I remember
when that Japanese man was lost in the woods and
claims that in some scientists agree that he went into
a state of hibernation. Yeah, we talked about him in
the Therapeutic Hypothermia episode. Yeah. I think we might have
done one of our old video things on him too.
Oh yeah, it seems like it man a while ago.
We've covered everything, dude. But there's been other cases like that, Yeah,
(37:29):
from people like stranded in cars. Uh, Swedish biologists who like, yeah,
for all intensive purposes, drowning an icy creek was revived.
That's yeah. I guess that's a little more like the
therapeutic hypothermia huh. But no, the same thing with the
Japanese man and the woman in the trunk of the car.
They were both exposed to below freezing temperatures and it
(37:51):
lowered their metabolism pretty amazing. And then there was this
guy who was not in freezing temperatures. Back in nineteen
seventy three, there was a journal article I can't remember
the name of the journal um that they did a
study with a Yogi Yogi Satya Murky and for eight
days he went into like a state of basically like
(38:11):
meditative hibernation as far as they don't. He didn't need
or drink anything. Um, he lost ten pounds four and
a half KOs. His body temperature dropped down to ninety
four degrees, which doesn't seem that much, but apparently that
was the ambient temperature of where he was sealed often.
And um, they had an e KG. They had e
(38:33):
KG sensors detecting his heartbeat, and apparently his heartbeat went
up to like two beats a minute and then started
to taper off. And after like the first day and
for the next seven days they basically couldn't detect a heartbeat.
He like lowered his heartbeat so much. And um, I
haven't seen I've seen it mentioned here there or whatever,
(38:54):
but I've not seen anybody say, well, this is how
he did it, or this is the trick. Um. It
seems to be one of those weird curiosities of science
that it's just kind of over there, you know what
I mean. I think I remember that. I'm like, that's incredible.
When I was a kid. No, oh yeah, remember that show.
I think I remember a piece on this dude. I
(39:15):
wouldn't be surprised if they did. You have his name,
Yogi Sachi Murty, different guy. There was another Yogi though
on that show, Yogi Bearra. No, he could do the
same thing right there on the bench. Da dugout? Uh?
Do we should we talk about the hydrogen sulfide real quick?
There's a cell biologist named Mark Roth at the Fred
(39:36):
Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and cl and UM. In two
thousand five, there was a big experiment where uh, scientists
induced hibernation and lab mice by giving them h hydrogen
sulfide gas and apparently it shut down there. It really
induced hibernation, the body temperature, shut down their metabolic processes,
(39:59):
and then they gave them normal air and then they
were fine again. And they're thinking they're they're trying it
now on roundworms, which apparently we have the same reaction
humans do. What's it called nitrogen sulfide The effect? Oh yeah,
it's like that initial not it's kind of like, you know,
gas somebody and it knocks them out. Uh. And they're
doing experiments that they think that might be the key
(40:22):
to inducing this in humans, whether for space travel or
I think what was one of the other things they
said it would be good for is um oregan transplants, right,
that's it, And by that I meant Oregon, not Oregon transplants. Yeah,
and people moving from northern California. Um. I think they
(40:42):
mentioned something too about people in vegetative states. Uh, they
could help them out if they're if they kind of
shut their metabolic functioning down while they wait for a
cure or something. I'm not sure. The thing I saw
about the that gas was that if you main exposed
to it, you die, which I guess is like some
(41:04):
sort of like inert gas asphyxiation. But it seemed different
than that, Like, I don't know why that would mean
that it showed promise for hibernation. Maybe if, like you,
you expose somebody to it and then let off a
little bit, and then expose them to it and let
off that you could keep it up like that. Yea,
like a good dentist. We'll go, we'll go run our
(41:24):
own experiments after this. If you want to know more
about hibernation, you can tape that word in the search
bar and they'll bring up this article, which is a
grabster article. Oh, that's right, yeah, marcro quality. Uh. And
since I said grabs there, it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this wine growing. Hey, guys, enjoyed the
(41:46):
episode on ice ages and commend you on your ability
to once again distill a complicated subject into an informative
entertainment piece. That's what we do. As a quick note
from the wine industry, we often and I often personally
prefer the term wine growing. You broke you both chuckled
at the phrase in the episode, but actually conveys the
(42:07):
job better than anything else. Grapes grown for wine are
generally different varieties held to different standards than grapes grown
for eating or juice production. Berries are smaller, contain less juice,
more acid and sugar, and have bitter skins and seeds,
which make them less appetizing than the grapes you find
in the supermarket. The piece are the qualities that make
good wine. In fact, many professional associations in the wine
(42:29):
industry refer to themselves as wine growers. Unfortunately, the vines
don't grow and finished bottles wine is made there in
the vineyard, though the goal is to bring out the
best in the fruit once it is inside the winery.
I keep up the good work. I encourage you to
try some of the wines from around Delanaga, Georgia. Great
wine is made everywhere. You may be surprised. What is
just down the road, Steve, Steve, Steve, send us some wine. Yeah, man,
(42:52):
that's how we try some wine. I'm in the wine industry.
Go try someone send us some wine. Yes, Steve, I
like big beefy red full bodied reds, dry whites. What
do you like? I love Rose's, Okay, I like uh reds.
I guess fruity reds like z Infandel's and Sara's um
and uh, I'm cool with any white's red champagne to Steve,
(43:17):
or any kind of sparkling wine I should say. Yeah.
I recommend to you and others out there to watch
this great documentary. Did you see PSALM, the original s
O M M documentary about the Somalia Master Somalia testing process.
It was good. Uh. There's a sequel now from the
same makers called Some Inside the Bottle, where it's just
(43:39):
a look at wine. There are ten different topics they
cover about the wine in the wine industry, and it's
really really good. I'll check that one up. Yeah, you
can learn a lot from it. Okay, it'll make you thirsty.
We need to do a whole episode on wine. We
still have yet to do. Yeah. Emily asked me that
when we were watching it, She's like, have you not
done this yet? And I said, that's one I might
(44:00):
be most afraid of. Period. Oh yeah, worse than soccer
chess what we did soccer and chess. I'm more intimidated
by the wine podcast because it cares so much about
it and you could do a you could have a
podcast series on wine would be yeah, there are plenty
so it would be tough to sum it up. Do this.
(44:23):
We'll do it. We're doing wine, all right, it'll be great, Chuck,
you'll love it so scared. Uh. If you want to
get in touch with us again, you can hang out
with me on Twitter at Josh Underscore, UM Underscore Clark.
You can also hang out with Stuff you Should Know
in general at s Y s K podcast. You can
hang out with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
(44:45):
You can hang out with Stuff you Should Know on
Facebook at Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know UM.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
how stuff Works dot com uh and, as always, hang
out with us at our home on the web Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
(45:06):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
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Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.