Do Tasmanian Animals Hibernate?

When I realized our trip was planned for the winter, I was initially concerned that the season would affect our chances of seeing some of the wildlife, since they would be hibernating for the winter. Hibernation is a state of lowered metabolism marked by lack of activity. In mammals it is characterized by a low body temperature and sometimes dramatically lowered breathing and heart rate. Common animals that hibernate include ground squirrels and other rodents, hedgehogs and other insectivores, some mouse lemurs, and bears, although the latter experience a less dramatic drop in body temperature.

It turns out that most marsupials don't experience full-blown winter hibernation. Some, like the dunnart and the pygmy possum, experience a daily or multi-day torpor, which is like a mini-hibernation.

A sleepy echidna

One Tasmanian animal that does curl up for the winter is the short-beaked echidna, which isn't a marsupial but a monotreme or egg-laying mammal. In the autumn and winter, echidnas will burrow into the ground and hibernate for several months, during which their body temperature can fall to as low as 5 degrees C. They're actually have the slowest metabolism of any mammal, about 3
0% of that of placental mammals (that's even slower than sloths!). Luckily, we'll be there in spring, and most of the echidnas will have woken up by then (not that we're particularly likely to see them in the wild anyway, but at least we have a chance).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-beaked_echidna
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090105/full/news.2008.1344.html
http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9717/hib_by_echidnas_.pdf