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Calm down, reader, this is not a zombie from the animal world. But even so, the phenomenon is surprising. The smallest land mammal, the pygmy shrew (Suncus Etruscan), also known as the fox, has an intriguing trick to save energy during the winter.
When food is scarce and many animals migrate to other regions or even lose their fur to the point of hibernation, the fox becomes radicalized: to survive the coldest months, the animal “eats” its own brain, reducing the organ up to a quarter. By reducing the size of its brain, the animal ends up relieving its energy demand.
No heavier than a playing card, this tiny mammal needs to eat eight times its body weight every day. Much of the spring brain mass is recovered in the spring, during which time the shrew feasts on small insects. This is also the time of the reproductive cycle, which requires extra energy.
This characteristic of the mammal that inhabits central and northern Europe and much of Asia was observed for the first time in the 1940s, but only in 2017 did scientific experiments with individuals of the species lead to a specific article about it.
The mechanism of seasonal brain shrinkage – called Dehnel’s phenomenon – has already been observed in other small mammals with high metabolisms, including weasels and moles, reports the Washington Post.
More than a biological curiosity, the paper points out that shrinking the shrew’s brain and subsequent recovery of brain power could help doctors treat Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases. For example, it is possible to develop drugs to mimic the change in brain chemistry of shrews in humans.
According to the scientists, it is the lipid-rich white matter shed throughout the brain that appears to disappear in the animal, and this same deterioration is a symptom of multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Researchers are now studying how cognitive ability is recovered and maintained. For this, they test the fox’s movement in a labyrinth made of LEGO bricks and other laboratory puzzles.
There are high expectations with the studio. “For how many centuries have people been studying European fauna? And how many thousands and thousands of scientists have been looking for it and have not seen it? Think of all the amazing things that are hidden out there because we never look at them,” said Liliana M. Dávalos, evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York, referring not only to the shrew, but also to other ecosystems such as rainforests.
