Why Do Animals Sleep?
Bryson Voirin A male three-toed sloth showing off his new EEG hat. We use converted APS film canisters to house and waterproof the sleep logger. In today’s digital world, locating stockpiles of these canisters is something of a treasure hunt.
Bryson Voirin, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany and a fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, writes from Panama, where he is studying sleep in wild frigate birds.I love to sleep. That feeling when you wake up fully rested, crisp and fresh, is nirvana. Sleep is essential part of our daily lives. Stop sleeping and your body starts losing function, mental clarity evaporates, and you eventually die. Sleep seems to be essential for all animals, given that every animal studied has been found to sleep. Insects, fish, birds, and I all participate in this daily phenomenon. But why do we sleep? What purpose does it serve? The truth is, we don’t really know. We know loads about the neuronal pathways that define the various stages of sleep. We also know what happens when we are sleep-deprived (think of staying up all night for a final exam). But the true purpose of this curious state that we enter nightly remains mysterious. [...]
I think we sleep to let our bodies do what they do naturally, which is regenerate and remodel, while our minds go cavort in fields of dreams; mental spa time, if you will, although some nightmares are more like torture dungeons. And I think captive animals and wild animals aware they're under observation sleep more than unobserved wild ones because their lives are more cushy (or boring, however one might look at it). Animals can tell pretty quickly if an observer wants to watch them or eat them, and one that wants to watch them adds a level of security by their mere presence, while animals in captivity don't need to find food, let alone be aware of or fend off predators.
That they alter their chemistry through diet is no surprise; different environments and sets of predators would require different strengths, and successful populations would be the ones that learned how to enhance those strengths, and some of 'em probably just like doin' it. :D
Morning sloths and night sloths just makes sense to me; if people could live on our own schedules those who tend to be up in the morning would probably be drawn to one another and those who tend to be up at night would be drawn to others with similar cycles. We just don't have that luxury since most people's lives demand that they be up and active at particular times. For sloths it probably doesn't matter all that much - they can forage and eat any time of night or day and their camouflage would only be enhanced by darkness - but for, for instance, meerkats it matters; if they aren't up at the crack of dawn they'll miss out on food they must have with their quick little metabolisms unless they're willing and able to work through the hottest part of the day when the rest of the troupe is napping (which can itself be deadly, making it not really a viable option), so those who like to sleep in just wouldn't live long.
I've read elsewhere that such myths as 'male lions kill and eat the young of other males when they take over a pride' and 'swans/wolves/beavers/etc. are monogamous' are also being debunked by projects like this, and I think it's really cool how much information we're able to gather and disseminate these days about, among other things, how nature *really* is - ordered, yet messy, just like all of life. :)
Comments
Post a Comment