Let sleeping bears lie

This is a first in a series of articles and videos giving a behind the scenes view of life at the Scottish Deer Centre. For our first episode, we will take a look at the phenomenon known as Hibernation. How would you like to spend half the year eating massive amounts of food and building up an impressive layer of fat only to sleep through the winter and wake up skinny again for spring? Sounds too good to be true, right? Believe it or not, this is exactly what many animals do. The sleepy winter period, along with the changes in a bear’s behaviour and physiology that accompany it, is known as hibernation. Hibernation is an adaptation which has evolved in many species across the animal kingdom but perhaps the most famous of all hibernators are the bears. Not all bears hibernate and it is a behaviour found only in temperate species which must deal with limited food during harsh winters. As European brown bears, Loki and Nelly would likely hibernate in the wild, so we try and encourage this behaviour in captivity too. During autumn, the bears enter a state known as “hyperphagia” which literally means overeating, where they devour pretty much anything they can get their paws on. Young Loki gets up to nearly 280Kg during this time, eating upwards of 15,000 calories a day! This is all in preparation for a long period of sleeping and limited activity where, in response to low temperatures, a bear's heart rate and body temperature drop. The length of this period varies dramatically but on average lasts around 6 months (October – April). Here at the deer centre, our guys don’t sleep for nearly as long as this, because they are well aware that food is available for them, so we often see them up checking to see what treats our keepers might have for them. Enjoy our video of the bears cosied up for winter and if you have any questions or want to find out more join in the discussion below!

Andrew For further reading see: Evans, A., Singh, N., Friebe, A., Arnemo, J., Laske, T., Fröbert, O., Swenson, J. and Blanc, S. (2016). Drivers of hibernation in the brown bear. Frontiers in Zoology, 13(1).