Interesanta eseja par hibernāciju.


https://aeon.co/essays/how-animals-learned-to-hibernate-and-why-we-cant-do-it-yet

Did our ancestors use hibernation to survive through the winter when it was cold outside or food supplies dwindled? Or is the entire notion of hibernation related to winter misconstrued, and we need a new and fresh perspective? As we know, there are tropical lemurs that can hibernate at high body temperatures, which suggests that being related to winter is a contingent and unimportant feature of a much broader phenomenon than the name suggests. Scientists now agree that animals hibernate not only to save energy or overwinter cold seasons, but as a way to deal with other environmental calamities. This may include wildfires, heatwaves, storms and perhaps even natural disasters on a cosmic scale, such as the meteorite collisions with Earth that wiped out the dinosaurs but spared small primitive mammals that could well have survived thanks to their gift of hibernating.

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For example – what is the relationship between hibernation and sleep? Recent research in several hibernating species reveals that animals often enter the state of hibernation via sleep, as if sleep were the gateway to the state of hibernation, being the first step towards hypometabolism. Where does sleep end and hibernation begin? That’s not an easy question to answer definitively. The relationship between torpor and sleep remains poorly understood and at best confusing, not least because of a lack of clearly defined concepts in this area.

Hibernating animals appear to be sleeping, yet we define sleep using explicitly brain- and behaviour-centric criteria, such as immobility, an elevated arousal threshold and characteristic brainwaves, while hibernation and torpor are defined based on metabolic criteria. Perhaps sleep has evolved from more ‘primitive’ hypometabolic states, and the animal that goes from sleep to hibernation recapitulates that evolution in reverse? Can we perhaps even view sleep as an aborted form of hibernation, emerging when our ancestors learned to apply the break at the right moment, to remain in control of the bodily state rather than plunging into torpidity?

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Beigās ir izteikts minējums, ka varbūt cilvēku suga vienmēr ir zinājusi kā hibernēties un tas tiks darīts mirklī, kad citas izejas vairs nebūs.