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Shrews have been found to shrink and regenerate tissue in their heads in response to seasonal variations:
Common shrews shrink their heads — including their skulls — in winter, researchers have found. They believe that this dramatic example of downsizing may help the animals to survive when food is scarce.
Individual wild common shrews (Sorex araneus) captured and tagged in Germany showed large reductions in skull size and body mass over the winter. Their spines also got shorter, and major organs, including the heart, lungs and spleen, shrank. Even their brain mass dropped by 20–30%, according to Javier Lázaro, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany. In spring, the animals started to regrow.
"We hypothesize that these seasonal changes could have adaptive value," says Lázaro, who led the work. Shrews have an extremely fast metabolism, he points out, and reducing their body mass during winter might increase their chances of survival, because they wouldn't need so much food. In particular, he adds, "reducing brain size might save energy, as the brain is energetically so expensive".
Also at The Guardian.
Profound reversible seasonal changes of individual skull size in a mammal (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.08.055) (DX)
(Score: 4, Funny) by fyngyrz on Friday October 27 2017, @09:32PM (4 children)
This is the same thing people do when they join the Republican party. Drops the level of mental activity down to the absolute minimum, saves all kinds of calories. Then they no longer care about the health of the young (saves money!) or adults either, for that matter (saves even more money!) the environment, etc. Democrats too: their skulls shrink radically as soon as someone says "constitution" or "guns."
It only ends when the Republicans lose their healthcare, pollution controls, train and airline access, and spawn to the warmongers in both parties; for the Democrats, it tends to end when someone searches their stuff without a warrant, or arrests their spawn for flaming a doobie. At that point, people become independents and their skulls begin to return to normal size.
This whole skull size variance thing is a well known human characteristic. Move along.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 28 2017, @12:50AM (3 children)
It's quite a stretch to equate the reaction of USians with the whole humanity, don't you think?
Some may say that equating Republicans and Democrats with human beings is a stretch, but... meh... I don't know any of them to make a personal assessment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday October 28 2017, @02:23AM
No. I don't. I see this kind of thing pretty much everywhere I look.
YMMV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 28 2017, @03:57AM (1 child)
Our Democratic Republican Party is roughly equivalent to your Liberal National Party.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 28 2017, @04:21AM
Except they both are a bit on the right of it; bot yes, LNP is struggling now to lower the gap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford