eli5…How do wild mammals not freeze to death

Question

Deer, foxes, rabbits, etc. are all warm blooded mammals that regularly experience sub-freezing temperatures that would kill humans in a matter of hours. How do they survive?

In: 1817

Answer 1

Simple answer is that some do die. Survival of the fittest (natural selection, or evolution) has acted on animals for countless generations, so the ones who exist are ones that had good fur and other features making it so they deal well with cold conditions (the ones that did not, died, and they have no descendants to suffer the same fate for the same reasons, for having inadequate fur or whatever). There will always be some that die by accident, bad luck, or some random thing or another, but mostly they have the features and behaviors that favor survival. Nature has forced them to be able to survive the conditions, and only the ones that can, do survive, or we would not have ANY such animals around (nature would have killed them off long ago). They exist today because they have features that help them survive nasty conditions.

Like humans, many mammals hide out when the weather gets too extreme for them. They find safe spots, such as burrows or caves, or dense pine forest zones that offer protection from exposure, and they stay there in relative warmth (they make themselves animal equivalents to tents or igloos or whatever using natural materials, just like a human used to living in the wild would do).

Wild animals expect bad conditions and actually are prepared and know how to deal with them (they do not know any other life). Humans have forgotten, as a general thing, so when we get stuck, unexpectedly, out in the wild in nasty conditions, we tend to die, which is why so many of us avoid nasty conditions. We don’t want to die from being stupid or from our lack of knowledge.

Not many of us have the skills and knowledge that was once needed to survive away from the house (I would not survive one winter as a fur trapper, for example), so we don’t go away from the house. And when we do by accident or stupidity, we tend to die.