iTHEMS Biology Seminar by Dr. Gen Kurosawa on August 26, 2021

During this covid-19 crisis, we check our body temperature (Tb) every day since Tb is essential variable of our body. In fact, some organisms like humans try to keep Tb constant, but some other organisms chose completely different strategies, including hibernation (冬眠). On August 26, I talked about hibernation at the iTHEMS Biology Seminar. Hibernation is a strategy for the organisms, including a primate to survive in a severe season with limited food and water availability. Although there have been a lot of studies about hibernation since the era of Aristotle, fundamental problems of hibernation remain unknown. Recently, we started to investigate mathematically body temperature profile of hibernating hamsters. During hibernation, the organisms drastically decrease their basal metabolisms, drop their body temperature (Tb) more than 10 degree, and become immobile. Mysteriously, Tb during hibernation does not remain constant at very low value, but greatly fluctuates with inconstant period of several days. At the seminar, I showed that a simple model can reproduce well and forecast Tb data during hibernation. Thankfully, there were a lot of questions and suggestions about the method of time-series analysis, hibernating species, and so on which are precious to me. This study is the collaboration with Prof. Yoshifumi Yamaguchi at Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido Univ and Shingo Gibo at iTHEMS. I’m really enjoying this research. I am happy if the audiences enjoyed the seminar and forgot about the heat. Thanks!