Take a few naps instead: penguins only sleep for four seconds at a time

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About eight million breeding pairs of penguins, whose scientific name is Pygoscelis antarctica, live in Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. The male and female take turns incubating the eggs. Since they are alone in the nest, they have to constantly protect their eggs from brown skuas, which are birds of prey. Parent birds also have to protect their nests against other penguins trying to steal the nesting material.

This constant tension is the reason for the chinstrap penguin’s unusual sleep behavior: During breeding, parent birds accumulate large amounts of sleep over thousands of microsleep stages, researchers discovered. They usually nod for more than four seconds at a time, but still sleep for up to twelve hours through more than 600 sleep stages per hour; This totals over 10,000 per day.

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 at a breeding colony on King George Island in Antarctica in December 2019. They outfitted 14 birds with custom-made data loggers to measure their brain activity. There were also video recordings and direct observations.

These bird activities were recorded over eleven days on land and at sea, during which the penguins dived to depths of 200 metres. The researchers then examined how nesting at the edge of the colony, where penguins are exposed to birds of prey, affected penguin sleep compared to the center of the colony.

The surprising result: Birds at the edge of the colony sleep ten percent more and one second longer than birds in the middle of the colony. Disturbances and aggression from other penguins within the colony have a greater impact on sleep than the threat of predators.

In the study, researchers revealed that penguins can also sleep by swimming in the sea. In general, they slept much less at sea than on land. After returning to land, lost sleep was partially compensated for, but again this only occurred in stages lasting an average of four seconds.

(SDA)

Source : Blick