Proven: Bears Hibernate (and Soon You Could Too) - TIME

Juniors Bildarchiv / Alamy

Until very recently, everything we knew about bear hibernation could be fairly well captured in a single sentence: We're pretty sure they do it. They disappear into dens for months at a time, they emerge in the spring looking a whole lot skinnier and we're reasonably sure they didn't send out for any food. Hibernation is the only thing that explains all of that.

But whether the long winter nap bears appear to engage in qualifies as true hibernation has always been another matter. The natural seasonal cycles of zoo bears is completely disrupted by the very fact of their captivity and studying them thus yields little. As for non-zoo individuals, well, you know that whole thing about not waking a sleeping bear? Scientists take that seriously. (Watch TIME's video "What Is Killing America's Bears? We Are.")

"Metabolism in the large hibernators of the bear family Ursidae have remained unknown because of technical limitations," is how research associate Oivend Toinen of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and his colleagues dryly put it in a new [...]

Full article at time.com

I hibernated our whole first winter here. It was awesome. :)

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