Thursday, February 2, 2012

A Long Sleep

After watching Lily the Black Bear ( see the last post ) for a couple of winters , it has become obvious to me that bears are not true hibernators such as ground hogs or ground squirrels. Then why do we persist in calling them hibernators?

I discovered that like a lot of things , it is simply a question of clarifying our vocabulary . Hibernation has degrees and each degree has a name : true, torpor, aestivation and diapause . Not all of these states are restricted to winter .

The best place to find out more, laid out simply for easy understanding , is this site :Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation . Keep things simple and many things are easy to understand...for the most part.

2 comments:

  1. I remember reading recently as well that bears do not truly hibernate. It's funny because when we are told about hibernation it is mostly associated closely with bears. I'll check out the website; it sounds interesting.

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  2. Wow...I love to finds out bit's of info like this...will definitely check it out!

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