Instructify

January 15, 2009

On a blustery, icy winter day, we might all feel a bit like curling up, going to sleep, and not coming out again until the warmer days of spring. Students and teachers don’t have that option, however appealing it may be, but a lot of North Carolina animals do spend the winter tucked away in hibernation and their stories can provide fascinating opportunities for our students to learn about animals, ecosystems in winter, and even medical research. The Animal Department blog at the NC Museum of Life and Science provides an excellent overview of hibernation and related states, detailing the winter survival strategies of several native North Carolina animals on the museum grounds. The blog also follows the hibernation of Wendy the resident woodchuck in detail.

Perhaps the animal most famous for hibernation is the bear. The North Carolina Museum of Life and Science is also home to four black bears and the museum’s informative page about the lives of North Carolina’s wild black bears explains that while black bears enter a deep winter sleep during which their heartbeat slows and their body temperature drops, they can be easily awakened, which leads some scientists to question whether their cold weather slumber can truly be called hibernation. For a deeper look at this question, What’s in a Name? Hibernation Means Different Things to Different Animals by Mark D. Jones on the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission website provides more detail. He explains that even though bears wake up much more readily than many other animals that hibernate, the deeper sleeping animals like rodents must leave their dens from time to time to eat and to eliminate waste products while bears can go for months without doing so. Jones notes that researchers are trying to understand how bears process waste and avoid bone and muscle loss during such long periods of sleep, and their work may provide insights into human medical conditions such as kidney disease and the deterioration of muscular and skeletal systems.

Our native snakes spend the winter underground to avoid freezing temperatures and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh has a profile on hibernating snakes in their Nature Notebook, a regularly updated feature that profiles animals, plants, and other parts of North Carolina’s natural world.

Insects, too, change their routines to survive cold winter weather. Teachers who are interested in helping their students learn more about butterfly hibernation can explore the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science’s distance learning page for details on their one hour Migrate, Hibernate, Pupate program, an interactive virtual field trip that features two-way audio and video with a museum educator and can be adapted for grades 1 through 12.

Learning about how animals sleep through our wintry weather may not make us feel any warmer, but it is sure to awaken our curiosity about the natural world around us. -KATHRYN WALBERT

Big Word of the Month: Hibernation

What’s in a Name? Hibernation Means Different Things to Different Animals by Mark D. Jones

Profile on hibernating snakes via the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

North Carolina Museum of Natural Science’s distance learning page

Live every week like it’s Shark Week

Fun facts about animals at Natural History Notebooks