This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hoffman. This will just take a minute.

Does a bear produce feces in the woods? And do enterprising researchers scoop that poop to analyze its microbial composition?

You bet they do.

And what they find is that the ersign intestinal microbiome changes dramatically during hibernation, an internal microbial shakeup that could help bears do their big metabolic chill.

Brown bears spend the summer beefing up in preparation for their winter snooze.

They eat and eat and they pack on the pounds.

Yet despite this seasonal gluttony and weight gain, the bears appear to be immune to developing diabetes,

or the other metabolic disorders that befall yo-yo dieters of the human variety.

So researchers theorize that gut bacteria might play a role.

To check out that idea, the scientists collected scat from captured wild brown bears,

both during their season of feasting and during hibernation.

And in case you're wondering, they went in and got the stuff before it even hit the ground, if you get my drift.

An analysis of the excrement showed that bears summer bacteria are more diverse and include species that tend to promote energy storage.

What's more, when the researchers stripped mice of their own microbes

and gave them the bacteria from bears,

the rodents that received a summer sampler got fatter than those with the winter set. The in the journal Cell Reports. The researchers do not yet know whether fiddling with our own

gut bacteria could help us shed excess weight, or whether any such microbial diet plan would

necessitate a very long winter's nap.

Thanks for the minute.

For Scientific Americans 60 Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkins.