Real-life Pikachus eat yak poop to survive Tibetan winters - Livescience.com

Plateau pikas have adopted a pretty gross strategy for winter survival.

Pikas living at high altitudes in Asia eat yak poop to help them survive winter, a new study has found. .

The small, rabbit-like animals, often compared to Pokémon’s Pikachu character, can't hibernate through winter when food is scarce, so they slow their metabolism and eat yak poop to get by on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, where temperatures fall to minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 30 degrees Celsius). .

Animals adopt all sorts of unexpected strategies to survive, study first author John Speakman, a biology professor at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China, told Live Science in an email.

Such poop eating, or coprophagy, can help animals absorb nutrients they couldn't digest initially from their food, Live Science previously reported.

To answer this question, Speakman and his colleagues monitored plateau pikas for 13 years using various techniques such as filming the adorable creatures and implanting temperature-logging devices into the animals.

Yaks are abundant on some parts of the plateau and their feces are likely easily digestible for pikas, having already passed through the yak's digestive system.

Munching on yak poop may help pikas spend less energy than they would foraging for other food sources, according to the study.