Weeks after the world learned that contrary to the plot of Cocaine Bear, most bears cannot safely ingest a metric ton of cocaine, another shocking revelation has emerged about our favorite North American mammals — hibernation isn’t just for sleeping.


With spring in full swing, Twitter and TikTok have emerged from their den of ignorance, embarking on their now-annual epiphany surrounding what, exactly, it means when bears hibernate, realizing that despite the adages of our elementary school teachers and that one episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, hibernation is a complex process … one that has yet again proven our childhoods to be a lie.



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“Realizing a lot of my education is assumed knowledge. I’m concernt,” wrote one Twitter user alongside a screengrab of a viral TikTok. “I want financial compensation,” added another.


Anger at our elementary school teachers aside, what exactly goes down during these winter months? Technically defined as “the condition or period of an animal or plant spending the winter in a dormant state,” per Oxford, hibernation, is a state of being, as biological scientist Sean Farley explained.



“Bears hibernate during winter, but aren’t sleeping the whole time,” he wrote in a resource posted to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s webpage. “Hibernation for bears simply means they don’t need to eat or drink, and rarely urinate or defecate (or not at all),” he continued before detailing the “strong evolutionary pressure for bears to stay in their dens during winter if there is little or no food available.”


Despite these parameters, bears can and do emerge from their beauty sleep, doing so during several extreme occasions, “particularly when their den gets flooded or is badly damaged.”


Still confused? During yet another round of this realization back in 2021, TikToker @mndiaye_97 offered a very apt phone analogy. “So imagine right you walk into work and you realized you somehow forgot your phone charger,” he explained in a viral clip stitching yet another popular video on the matter.


“You wouldn’t just turn the phone off because then you couldn’t use it and people wouldn’t be able to call you. So instead you go on power save mode to save how much battery you use until you can get back to your charger,” he continued. “That is High-key what hibernation is. It’s power save mode for animals to get through times where there’s less food and therefore less energy around.”


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We must confess that it may not have been our teachers' fault after all, we probably just weren’t paying attention during Bear Studies 101.