Arctic Squirrel Surgery Could Yield Medical Solutions

T O O L I K  L A K E, Alaska, Oct. 13 -- The chunky squirrel was irritated and alert within the metal trap. It had been lured in by carrots but now it gnawed at the cage with its teeth and pushed with its paws to escape. But before it would be freed, it would become part of an experiment that could someday help suppress human appetites, or even save lives on the battlefield.

Ryan Long, an undergraduate student at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, strode across the shrubby tundra to the trap at the top of the small slope and gently picked it up to inspect the squirrel.

"Oh, look at that! It's a new one," he said, noticing the squirrel had no scar on its belly.

A few hours later the hefty little animal was lying flat and unconscious on a table under a scalpel.

Long was working with Brian Barnes, a biologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks who has been trapping and performing surgery on these bulkiest of all squirrels — the arctic ground squirrel — for nearly a dozen years on the slopes of northern Alaska.

The purpose, he explains, is to understand and perhaps tap into the squirrel's unusual ability to hibernate at below freezing temperatures for eight months every winter.

Supercooled Squirrels

Although many mammals hibernate, no one does it quite like the arctic ground squirrel, or the sik-sik, as they're called by the local Inuit people here. (The name mimics the squirrel's rasping, chirp-like call.).

After becoming plump from summer feeding, these animals tuck in for the winter in 2-foot deep burrows at around late August. Then for eight months, they allow their body temperatures to drop to as low as 26 degrees Fahrenheit — six degrees below freezing. Every three weeks or so they wake up for a few hours and sleep in a normal state before dropping back into hibernation.

Barnes believes the behavior could hold medical solutions for the future, from better preservation of donated organs to stabilizing injured soldiers until medical care is available, to developing a natural appetite suppressant modeled after the same mechanisms that allow squirrels to fast for the entire, long arctic winter.