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Hibernation What do animals do to prepare for the cold weather that winter will bring? Find out about hibernation and migration! Science Projects Animal Insulation Have you ever wondered how animals stay warm in the winter? Lots of animals grow extra fur to help keep their bodies warm, but most animals also put on extra fat during the fall that helps them stay warm all winter long. How does fat help keep them warm? Do this experiment to find out! What You Will Need:
What To Do:
What's Happening? The layer of Vaseline or shortening that you surrounded your hand with acted very similar to a layer of fat that animals grow for the winter. It protected your hand from the ice water and you were probably able to keep your covered hand in the water for longer than you could stand to keep your bare hand in! How did the Vaseline or shortening protect your hand, though? It insulated it from the cold water. This means that it kept the heat that your hand already had from escaping into the water and also blocked the cold temperature of the water from touching your hand as quickly. Your bare hand did not have this extra layer of protection and all the heat from that hand was transferred to the water almost right away. Then it only took a few seconds for the cold from the water to start making your hand feel very cold. Animals grow a layer of fat underneath their skin or fur that helps insulate them from cold weather, just like the layer of Vaseline did for your hand! Ways To Keep Warm What is the best way to stay warm outside on a cold day? Try these ideas and then decide which one works best! Go outside on a cold day and try each activity. Make sure you are wearing warm enough clothes to protect you from the cold, but you don't need to put on extra clothes to try to keep yourself even warmer than normal - just dress the way you would if you were going to go for a walk or to play outside.
What's Happening? Which activities kept you the warmest? Which ones made you the coldest? Which ones used the most energy (made you most tired)? Which ones used the least energy (didn't require you to do anything or didn't make you tired)? When you sit very still and don't move much, it is harder for your body to keep its natural heat. When you run around or move your muscles, it helps your blood flow through your veins better and keeps you warmer for longer. However, running around or using up a lot of energy will also make you tired faster. Wind also makes you get colder faster because it blows the warm air that is around your body away from you. If you are huddled up you will be warmer than if you are just sitting or standing, because more of your body heat is kept close to you for a longer time (the wind can't blow it away as fast). Now that you know a little bit about body heat, wind, and energy and how they work to keep you warm or make you cold, can you think of the best way for animals to keep warm during the winter? Where should they go to sleep? Should they group together? Winter Food How do animals find food in the winter? Sometimes it can be pretty hard. Do this activity to find out what it would be like if you had to eat food that was frozen or covered by ice! What You Will Need:
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What's Happening? Before you froze the fruit, you could probably smell it without trying very hard. After you covered the fruit with water and froze it, it was much harder to smell the fruit. That is because the water surrounded the fruit and then froze, which trapped the scent inside the ice. It also sort of watered down the smell of the fruit, making it harder for you to smell. The same thing happens to food in the wild after it freezes or when snow and ice cover the ground, branches, and berries. Snow makes it hard to animals to see their food and ice makes it hard for them to smell it and eat it. This is one of the reasons that a lot of animals collect food in the fall and store it someplace dry to eat during the winter when food will be harder to find! Because of the cold weather, there is also less food available, even for the animals that could find it. That is because most plants lose their leaves and stop producing fruit and go dormant so that they can also survive the winter! Fun Facts Several kinds of animals, including bats, ladybugs, and snakes like to huddle together to hibernate for the winter. More bodies close together means they can produce more heat to share with each other. Some birds have blood vessels that carry warm blood from their heart to their feet right next to the vessels that carry colder blood from their feet back to their heart. The warm blood helps warm up the colder blood and keeps the bird's feet and legs warmer, almost as though they had a built-in foot warmer! A lot of plants can survive the winter just by being covered with a deep layer of snow. The snow acts like insulation and keeps them warmer than they would be in the cold dry air without being covered by snow. Most birds fly at night when they migrate! They eat during the day when it's easiest to find food and avoid predators. Silly Science Why do birds fly south for the winter? (Answer: Because it's too far to walk.) What is black, white, and, red all over? (Answer: A sun-burnt penguin!) Way Cool Websites Play a matching memory game with hibernating animals. Watch a bear hibernating in its den in this video! Color lots of hibernating animals with this collection of coloring pages. Teacher Tidbits Animals that Hibernate  Many animals snuggle up in caves, burrows (holes in the ground), or hollow tree trunks and sleep during the cold winter months when food is harder to find and cold weather makes it harder for their bodies to work. This is called hibernating. When an animal hibernates, its heart beats very slowly and it also breathes less. The animal's body temperature goes way down also - to just a few degrees above freezing! The animal's brain also goes into a form of sleep. It takes a long time for a hibernating animal to wake up. Hibernating is great for animals because they do not have to try to find food and they don't have to even go outside in the cold at all! Because its body slows down and stops working the way it normally does and because the animal is not moving around and using up energy, its body is able to survive off of the fat that it stored up by eating a lot in the fall. Besides being protected from the cold while they hibernate, the sleeping animals are also usually well protected from any other animals who might bother them. They make sure their den, cave, or burrow is only big enough for them and their babies and that it is someplace that is hard for other animals to find. Some animals that hibernate are reptiles and amphibians like frogs and snakes, insects like ladybugs and bees, some fish, and some mammals like bats, hedghogs, and prairie dogs. Some animals sleep for long lengths of time in the winter, but they do not go into true hibernation. Their heart and breathing slows down, but most of the time their body temperature does not drop as much. They will wake up a few times during the winter to move around a little bit or to eat food they have stored in their den. It doesn't take them as long to wake up as true hibernators, but they will be sluggish for awhile. Animals that go into this type of hibernation (sometimes called torpor ) include bears, chipmunks, and raccoons. Even though they don't sleep all winter long, they still save lots of energy because their bodies slow down and make food last much longer than normal. Other animals, like foxes and rabbits, do not hibernate at all - they stay active throughout winter. Their speed helps them find and catch food (or escape from predators) and their fur usually changes to white so that they blend in with the snow and are protected from other larger animals. Birds that Migrate  Lots of different kinds of birds fly south to warmer areas when it starts to get cold. This is called migrating. Cold weather makes it harder for them to find food, even if they can survive the cold. Birds like ducks and geese that get their food from lakes and ponds will usually fly someplace warmer when the water starts to freeze, because they can't catch fish and other things from the water anymore! Cold weather also means it is harder for birds to find shelter because many of the plants and trees they build nests in lose their leaves and become bare. When snow comes, birds will need to have shelter, and a tree without leaves won't do them much good. Birds that migrate usually leave at about the same time each year and fly back home at around the same time each spring! How do they know when to come back to their homes? Well, that is something we don't know for sure, but birds (like most other animals) have strong instincts that tell them when it's warm enough to head back to their homes up north. Instincts also help birds learn how to fly, help mother animals know how to take care of their babies, and other important things that help them survive. When birds migrate, they fly in large groups or flocks and they often fly in the shape of the letter "v," which helps them glide along on the currents in the air so they don't have to work as hard! Some kinds of birds might fly very long distances, like from Canada down to Central America, while other kinds of birds only fly across a few states. It can take the flocks several weeks or even months to get to their winter home in the south, depending on how far they have to go and how fast they fly. Birds aren't the only animals who migrate! Monarch butterflies live in Canada and the northern U.S. in the summer, but they fly all the way south to Mexico for the winter. Blue whales spend the winter in warmer waters down south where their babies are born, and then they travel north in the summer to colder water where there is a lot to eat. Plants that Go Dormant When winter comes, plants also go through changes to make it through the cold. Many trees and plants lose their leaves in the fall and most plants stop making food and growing during the winter. This is called being dormant. Some plants produce seeds in the fall and then die. The seeds stay dormant all winter and then sprout in the spring. Other plants store food in their roots and then lose the stems and leaves that are above ground. In the spring the food that was stored in the roots will provide energy for the plant to sprout and grow again. Science Words Dormant - something that is alive, but is temporarily not growing or having any physical activity. This usually happens in the winter to protect the living thing from the cold. Hibernate - when an animal's body goes into a deep sleep for a long period of time and the animal's heart rate, temperature, and breathing all drop or slow down. Torpor - a state of sleep when an animal's body slows down but their temperature does not drop and the sleep does not last as long as hibernation does. Migrate - traveling to the same place at about the same time each fall or winter and returning each spring.
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