Source: Internet
Guwahati, Dec 2: Power naps are an integral part of everyone's life because they boost energy to work efficiently throughout the remainder of the day. This is a brief sleep taken for the desired effect of improving one’s alertness.
However, a study found that Penguins are the champion power nappers who can fall asleep thousands of times, each about a few seconds long, over the course of a single day.
Paul-Antione Libourel, a neuroscientist at the Neuroscience Research Centre of Lyon in France who helped make the discovery said, “This just highlights the fact that we don’t know much about sleep, and all animals are not sleeping like the way we read in textbooks.”
Earlier in 2019, Dr. Libourel and his colleagues outfitted the penguins with electrodes and other sensors to record their activities for up to 11 days on King George Island, 70 miles north of Antarctica.
During their research, they found that penguins split their time between swimming in the ocean and staying at the nests to keep their eggs and chicks warm. Between these trips, which consume around 9 hours, the birds spent at least 2 hours on average taking turns caring for their young.
The study found that penguins, while in the ocean, barely slept, spending just three percent of their time resting on the surface of the sea. When the penguins return to their nests, their brain waves slow down to a pattern typical for sleeping birds, but for a few seconds only. They wake up again only to fall back asleep, speeding through this cycle for 600 times in an hour.
In the study, the researcher speculated that the sleep patterns of the penguins reflect the extreme conditions where they doze, as their colonies are noisy and crowded, with birds constantly waddling back and forth from the sea.
Meanwhile, the habitats were also noted, considering how dangerous they were, as at any moment, there were chances of a gull-like bird called a brown skua diving at a nest and eating eggs or chicks.
The fact that penguins managed to sleep despite such extreme disturbances suggests to Dr. Libourel that microsleep provides some essential benefits.