Why chinstrap penguins sleep thousands of times a day
But only for four seconds at a time
Sleep is a bit of an evolutionary mystery. A sleeping animal cannot look for food, defend its territory, flee from danger or find a mate. The fact that sleep is nonetheless ubiquitous among animals suggests its restorative powers are essential. So does the fact that, if laboratory animals are deprived of it for long enough, they die.
Some animals, though, try to have their cake and eat it. Dolphins and ducks can sleep with only half their brains at a time, leaving the other half alert. Now a paper in Science by Paul-Antoine Libourel from the Lyon Centre for Research in Neurosciences, and Won Young Lee from the Korea Polar Research Institute, reports another ingenious dodge. Chinstrap penguins, it seems, take their sleep in the form of thousands of tiny micro-naps—or at least, they do when they are nesting.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Forty thousand winks near the sea"
From the December 2nd 2023 edition
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