Interesting facts about sleep in the animal kingdom

What about sleep? Firstly, it is very nice. Secondly, terribly annoying when interrupted. In fact, during sleep, many things that are still incomprehensible to science occur: for example, what nature dreams have, how the body functions during sleep, and finally, how it generally appeared among human options. Another interesting question: how do animals sleep and do they all do it?

Who sleeps upside down

Half an hour or half a day

Everyone seems to sleep. But different types of animals require different periods and duration of sleep. For example, giraffes have about 30 minutes of deep sleep per day, divided into several separate sessions. Conversely, some bats are ready to doze upside down for 20 hours a day. Most mammalian species need much more sleep in their youth than in adulthood. Although young killer whales and dolphins in the first few months of life may not sleep at all.

How birds sleep in flight

In some cases, certain species may interfere with normal sleep patterns due to very important events in life. For example, like students on the night before the exam, or migratory birds that sleep much less during the migration seasons than during the off-season. They are able to overcome thousands of kilometers without stopping the flight for weeks! Some birds last a few minutes, and sometimes they use one hemisphere of the brain. While it sleeps, the second is awake. By the way, marine mammals such as whales and dolphins sleep in the same way. This allows them to always be on the alert and not oversleep something important.

Sleeping or pretending

As for invertebrates and other simpler life forms, they seldom get studied with EEG. Therefore, for them, the concept of "dream" is synonymous with "physical inactivity" when, with a certain cyclical nature, they take typical poses and then return to activity. In the case of fish and amphibians, it is still unclear whether they actually sleep or simply show signs that indicate a state of rest. But insects, for example, prefer to sleep.