Hibernation w/ Frank van Breukelen

Here We Are

Shane Mauss

Science

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2023

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode comes from a conversation with the Director of Life Sciences here at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

His research focuses on hibernation! Why do animals do it? What's the difference between say... torpor and taking a nap? Could humans ever hibernate?

Plus, we get to dive into some other fascinating research about fish species, specifically, the very cute pupfish, which somehow live in the desert!

Learn more about Frank's work: https://www.unlv.edu/news/expert/frank-van-breukelen

https://www.shanemauss.com/⁠

Thank you for watching and for being an inquisitive being.

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you grab one of these, um, one of these ground squirrels up in the mountains here and you stick
0:05.6	them in the lab and it just, you keep the temperature warm and constant all of the time where they
0:11.3	just never going to go into hibernation or... It's funny that you say that because that's literally
0:16.0	what we're doing right now for a big project with NASA. Really? So we're looking at one temperature. I like to
0:21.6	have NASA level ideas, generally on the fly.
0:47.3	Hello everybody and welcome back to the here we are podcast today.
0:51.1	I am in Las Vegas. I'm at UNLV talking with Frank Van Brookland today. Thank you so much for joining me.
0:59.2	Thank you for having me. So tell people a little bit of an overview of what you do.
1:05.1	So I'm a professor and I'm the director of the School of Life Sciences. I'm interested in how
1:12.0	animals hibernate. I'm really sort of interested in how animals live and what we deem to be really
1:17.2	harsh environments. And one of the main mechanisms for dealing with harsh environments is to literally
1:22.4	sort of chuck out, right, is to go into a metabolic depression, use much less energy and survive
1:29.3	for a period of time. Yeah, that's a, that's a main, that's all you study all the action that no one
1:35.5	gets to see. Yeah, it's really boring actually. Yeah. It's boring because to me, well, it's, it's,
1:42.5	it's so interesting to think about because we think about these animals that high,
1:46.7	like when we see them, if you like, take a squirrel, for instance, when you ask someone to describe
1:53.8	what a squirrel is like, I mean, it's like the scattered running around jumpy thing. But most of
2:00.6	their life, they're actually spent in hibernation, right? I mean, that's the funny part.
2:04.8	Aren't they one of the biggest hibernators kind of out there? Well, I mean, like a bear is a really
2:09.0	big hibernator, right? And, and, and actually, you know, our definitions of hibernator or
2:14.5	hibernation are every evolving. Just a few years ago, I would have told you that bears didn't
2:19.2	hibernate. I would have said that they dend because they were big and they didn't have a real big
	...

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