For us humans, constantly falling asleep indicates a lack of sleep, but for chinstrap penguins it is normal: the birds, which nest in a dangerous environment, get a total of up to twelve hours of sleep per day through more than 10,000 extremely short naps. , as a team of researchers has discovered.
The almost eight million breeding pairs of the penguin species with the scientific name Pygoscelis antarctica live in Antarctica and on several islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. The female and male take turns incubating. Only in the nest do they have to constantly protect their eggs from birds of prey, the brown skuas. The parent birds also have to defend their nest against other penguins that try to steal nesting material.
Sleep through thousands of microsleep stages
This constant tension is the reason for the chinstrap penguin’s unusual sleeping behavior: During breeding, the parent birds accumulate large amounts of sleep through thousands of microsleep phases, as the researchers discovered.
They usually nap for more than four seconds at a time, but they still get twelve hours of sleep during more than 600 sleep phases per hour – a total of more than 10,000 per day – as the scientists from France and South Korea report in the American journal ‘Science ‘.
The research team, led by Paul-Antoine Libourel from the Neuroscience Research Center in Lyon, recorded the behavior and brain activity of wild chinstrap penguins breeding in a breeding colony on King George Island in Antarctica in December 2019. To measure their brain activity, they equipped 14 birds with custom-made data loggers. There were also video recordings and direct observations.
Less sleep in the center of the colony
These bird activities were recorded over eleven days on land and at sea, during which the penguins dived to depths of 200 meters. The researchers then examined how nesting at the edge of the colony, where the penguins are exposed to birds of prey, compared to the center of the colony, affected the penguins’ sleep.
The surprising result: the birds at the edge of the colony sleep ten percent more and one second longer than the birds in the middle of the colony. Disturbance and aggression from other penguins within the colony therefore have a greater impact on sleep than the threat of predators.
Sleep even while swimming
In the study, the researchers also showed that penguins can also sleep floating at sea. In general, they spent significantly less time sleeping at sea than on land. After returning to land, the lost sleep was partially recovered, although again only in phases of an average of four seconds.
Source: Krone
I am an experienced and passionate journalist with a strong track record in news website reporting. I specialize in technology coverage, breaking stories on the latest developments and trends from around the world. Working for Today Times Live has given me the opportunity to write thought-provoking pieces that have caught the attention of many readers.
