Daniel Blumstein

which is super interesting.

Yellow-bellied marmots are incredibly efficient hibernators.

In big ones, at the end of the year, are about five kilos, which is pretty big.

That's a big cat.

They burn, when they're in deep torpor, a gram of fat a day.

Yeah, so basically biomedical researchers study marmots in part to understand how you can be obese without having health consequences.

So they don't get all the things that we get if we eat like a marmot.

Actually, marmots are vegetarian, so maybe we should eat like marmots.

Well, they have both.

And my friend who did the research on this, Walter Arnold, formerly in Germany, said, no, it got more complex than that.

But I'll say the sort of dumbed down version that I can understand.

And that is that if you're a hibernator, you have to put on two types of fat.

You have to put on heating oil and you have to put on insulation.

So one of them is easier to burn during the winter for heating oil, and the other provides that insulation.

So what's really interesting is, you know, you might think it's easy to study what an animal eats.

It's actually really hard to study what an animal eats when you begin thinking about that these guys are looking for specific fatty acids.

So they eat plants, but plants aren't plants aren't plants, and different parts of the same plant have different fatty acid compositions.

So what they're eating, the specific fatty acids they're eating in particular ratios are important for putting on these different sorts of body fat.

Well, I would say they're the king of rodents, but capybara are the kings of rodents.

I love capybara.