Fecal transplants in pill form, and gut bacteria that nourish hibernating squirrels
Science Magazine Podcast
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Hibernation
The question of whether non ruminant animals, including humans, get some help from their microbes by liberating nitrogen from urea that they could eventually use has been around for a long time. People who've studied hibernation for decades have hypothesised that hibernators that go through the winter with no new nitrogen intake may be linked to their gut microbes. But there was very little evidence, good data, that suggested this happened. So we ask, does it happen in squirrels, ground squirrels? Does it happen especially prominently in hibernation? We went a step further and hypothesised that the longer fasting, the more important their symbiotic relationship with microbes might be.
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