Some animals deal with cold winters by going into hibernation, some burrow underground to stay warm and subsist on stockpiled food, while others migrate away to warmer climes but the cute fluffball-like animal called the plateau pika (Ochotona curzoniae) in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau did none of these. Instead, they continue to forage in the cold.
As the temperatures in their high-altitude home routinely dip to -30° C (-22° F), the grass that they typically eat becomes dry and brittle so the plateau pikas have to resort to a different and very unusual type of food. They eat yak poop.
Ecophysiologist John Speakman at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and colleagues measured the temperature and daily energy expenditure of 156 plateau pikas and found that they reduce their metabolism by almost 30 percent, partly by cooling their bodies a couple of degrees at night and becoming less active during the day.
At sites where there are yaks, there were more pikas but they were even less active. But why would the presence of yaks change the plateau pikas, wondered the researchers. They stumbled on the answer when they “found a sort of half-eaten yak turd in one of the burrows,” explained Speakman. The abundant yak poop could serve as an easily digestible meal that “massively reduces the amount of time [pikas] need to spend on the surface,” he added.
Image: Pika (Ochotona curzoniae) in eastern Tibet by Kunsang/Wikimedia Commons
#pika #plateaupika #winter #yak #poop #winter #zoology #yakpoop #hibernation
