AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Are there any animals that dont sleep11/26/2023 ![]() Despite our many human endeavours to escape or delay the process of ageing, it seems to be an inevitable part of life.īut … why? Why do living things gradually fall apart when they grow older? This preservation of a little sleep suggests that there is a minimum amount of sleep that is essential, even in these remarkable short sleepers.No one likes the thought of growing old. ![]() "However, an emerging pattern among the studies of short-sleeping animals is that none are completely sleepless. Sleeping while flying could be common among other bird species - such as common swifts ( Apus apus), which can fly for 10 months without landing - though scientists have no direct evidence for this.īut perhaps more surprisingly, the study found that the frigatebirds, while flying, slept on average just 42 minutes per day, even though they typically got more than 12 hours of shut-eye on land.ĭoes Rattenborg think we'll ever find an animal that doesn't sleep at all? They sometimes even slept in both hemispheres simultaneously while in flight. The monitors showed that the birds sometimes slept in one hemisphere of their brains at a time while they were soaring over the ocean. In a 2016 study, Rattenborg and his colleagues outfitted great frigatebirds ( Fregata minor) in the Galápagos Islands with a small device to measure electrical activity in the brain. "Some animals seem to survive on far less sleep than previously expected based on restorative theories for the function of sleep," Niels Rattenborg, who studies sleep in birds at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, told Live Science. Now, Gilestro and a few other researchers are starting to wonder if sleep is less necessary than people have thought. But these flies didn't die prematurely, like the Russian puppies did these virtually sleepless flies instead lived just as long as a control group that was left to sleep normally. In a further experiment, the researchers deprived the flies of 96 percent of their sleep time. One female even slept as little as 4 minutes a day on average. Gilestro and his colleagues observed that 6 percent of female flies slept for less than 72 minutes each day, compared to the average of 300 minutes that the other females slept. "We found that some flies hardly ever slept," study co-author Giorgio Gilestro, a lecturer of systems biology at Imperial College London, told Live Science. They could be the key to understanding sleep's function, scientists have said.Ī study published in February in the journal Science Advances monitored the sleeping habits of fruit flies. While total sleeplessness seems dangerous, some creatures can get by with remarkably short bouts of sleep. ![]() However, the underlying cause of death in these cases, and how it relates to sleep, is still unknown. Over subsequent decades, further sleep-deprivation experiments using other animals, like rodents and cockroaches, found similarly fatal results. Using an approach that now seems quite cruel, the physician kept puppies continuously awake, finding that they died after a few days of sleep deprivation. In her quest to figure out what exactly sleep is, she conducted the first sleep-deprivation experiment in animals. "We all love life, and we all wish to live as long as possible, but in spite of this, we sacrifice one-third, sometimes even half of our life in sleeping," Manacéïne once wrote. In the 1890s, Marie de Manacéïne, one of the first female physicians in Russia, was troubled by the mystery of sleep.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |