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Chinstrap penguins fall asleep about 10,000 times a day, scientist says
They sleep more than 11 hours a day, but not all at the same time
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The feeling of wanting to fall asleep during the day, even for a little while, is very familiar.
Whether it’s in a boring work meeting, on the train home, or even while watching TV, we’ve all had moments where we’ve slept for a few seconds.
But that’s nothing compared to chinstrap penguins, which fall asleep about 10,000 times a day, according to new research.
In the wild, penguins sleep more than 11 hours a day, but not all at once, it has been discovered.
New observations reveal that animals fall asleep thousands of times a day, but only for about four seconds at a time.
Whether it’s in a boring work meeting, on the train home, or even while watching TV, we’ve all had moments where we’ve slept for a few seconds. But that’s nothing compared to chinstrap penguins, which fall asleep about 10,000 times a day, according to new research.
This allows them to accumulate their daily sleep needs while remaining continually vigilant over their nests, the researchers said.
The team, from the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center and the Korea Polar Research Institute, recorded sleep behavior in a colony of chinstrap penguins in Antarctica.
They used remote electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring and other non-invasive sensors to find out how the animals managed to sleep.
An analysis, published in the journal Science, revealed that the birds did not sleep for long periods and instead fell asleep frequently: around 10,000 “microsleeps” per day that lasted just four seconds.
According to the authors, the findings suggest that, given the reproductive success of these penguins, the benefits of sleep may progressively increase.
In the wild, penguins sleep more than 11 hours a day, but not all at once, it has been learned
An accompanying article, ‘Perspectives’, written by experts from the University of California, San Diego and the University of Oxford, explains that the study calls into question the extent to which sleep can be disrupted before its benefits are lost.
“Contrary to conventional understandings of sleep, penguins did not sleep for long, consolidated periods,” they wrote.
“Instead, the birds were observed to fall asleep frequently, accumulating more than 11 hours of sleep per day in thousands of short periods that lasted just four seconds on average and are therefore called ‘microsleeps.’
“The data presented could be one of the most extreme examples of the incremental nature by which the benefits of sleep can accrue.
“Showing that sleeping in this way poses no cost to the penguin would challenge the current interpretation that fragmentation is inherently detrimental to sleep quality.”