If you think you need some beauty sleep, chinstrap penguins have you beat. A new study published in the Science journal broke down the cold-weather animals' sleeping habits and found they need a lot of extra Zs in order to function properly.
The researchers found that chinstrap penguins take more than 10,000 naps a day, with each nap lasting an average of four seconds. By using this micronap strategy, they're able to get around 11 hours of sleep each day, with each session including eye closure and sleep-related brain activity. Scientists were able to record this data using remote electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring and other non-invasive sensors as well as traditional video and in-person observation. In the end, they saw that chinstrap penguins in the colony had more than 600 microsleeps every hour and 75 percent of sleep was in spurts of 10 seconds or less.
The unique rest strategy was likely born out of necessity. Local birds called skuas have been known to prey on penguin eggs, and though penguins often parent in pairs, one is usually responsible for the precious eggs or tiny chicks at a time while the other is away foraging for food for several days. As a result, they can't risk taking a nap for more than a few seconds.
"Thousands of microsleeps lasting only 4 [seconds] is unprecedented, even among penguins," the study's authors marveled.
Lead author Paul-Antoine Libourel explained that the phenomenon isn't entirely new, but up until now, animals surviving solely on microsleeps for several days was unheard of.
"This is not unique across the animal kingdom," Libourel told CNN. "There [are] other animals that are sleeping quite fragmented or in very short bursts of sleep. But, to our knowledge, they were not able to sustain such extreme sleep fragmentation of days and hours, day and night, and continuously [as these penguins]. And this is what was very interesting in our findings."
If only humans had the ability to do the same.
from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/16kmHLf
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