A much more awake dormouse. Photo credit: Kleinsaeguer.at, http://www.flickr.com/photos/64478539@N07/6537089893/
It’s the sweetest, tiniest case of sleep apnea ever: This video of a zonked-out dormouse is going gangbusters on the Internets.
Dormice (from the Latin “dormir”, meaning to sleep) are one of the few British mammals that really hibernates — when the temperature falls below 15 degrees Celsius, the tiny mammal’s metabolism shuts down and it finds a comfortable, dry place to nest until it goes back up. Such is the dormouse’s famous reputation for sleeping that in Elizabethan England, one cure for sleeplessness was to rub dormouse fat on one’s feet. How or why that might work is lost to the ages, but the dormouse remained a symbol of sleepiness well into the Victorian era, when one slept through most of the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice in Wonderland.
