To avoid the harsh temperatures and lack of food that come with colder weather, some animals migrate. Others hibernate. But the pikas of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in northwestern China do neither
To avoid the harsh temperatures and lack of food that come with colder weather, some animals migrate.Pikas are pint-size, rodent-like mammals that look like a cross between a guinea pig and a rabbit. Of the 29 species worldwide, the American pika, native to the western United States and Canada, is well known for the way it collects plants in its mouth before stashing the food stockpiles underground to endure the winter.
Now, after 13 years of research, scientists say they’ve discovered the plateau pika’s secret to survival: the animals slow down their metabolism and supplement their usual diet of plants with yak droppings, which contain valuable, undigested nutrients. To prove the theory, Speakman and colleagues analyzed gut contents of more than 300 deceased plateau pikas—collected for another study in 2018 and 2019—and found that around 22 percent of the sample contained yak DNA. This is probably an underestimate because DNA degrades when feces sit in the sun, he says.shift to resemble those of the yaks’—suggesting that the animals may be also acquiring beneficial bacteria from yak feces.
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