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Migrating Birds Take Hundreds of Powernaps.
Ant writes "MSNBC reports that to help make up for sleep lost during marathon night flights, migratory birds take hundreds of powernaps during the day, each lasting only a few seconds, a new study suggests.
Every autumn, Swainson's thrushes fly up to 3,000 miles from their breeding grounds in northern Canada and Alaska to winter in Central and South America. Come spring, the birds make the long trek back. The birds fly mostly at night and often for long hours at a time, leaving little time for sleep."
At 4:20 in the morning, I could a couple of power naps as well.
Flap flap flap
Must stay awake...
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I'm falling!
Flapflapflapflapflap
Flap flap flap
Must stay awake...
Who ordered that?
When I was a student I also took several power-naps during the day to make up for lack of sleep.
They were called lectures.
I only take tens of powernaps during the day, and my boss is threatening to fire me. (True, each of them lasts longer than a few seconds ;-)
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
The HR department at Electronic Arts applauds the innovation as a "best practice."
Atleast they stay in good shape.
I remember hearing about this when I was like, 7-8 years old. I'm now 28.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Maybe the birds were getting those drowsy sessions and 'power naps' BECAUSE they were caged and being subjected to go through utterly boring and long observation periods when they would rather be flying over the ocean somewhere. Or they just closed their eyes every few minutes to curse the researchers to hell for caging them in the first place.
But seriously, studies of this kind tend to lose credibility when they start predicting the free behaviour of species while testing them under captive conditions. Going by this logic, I can say that lions in jungle start rattling the nearest metal bars or objects they can find when they feel hungry because I observed this behaviour in a bunch of lions in the nearest zoo. I know its stretching the point a bit, and that 'some' behaviour show consistence irrespective of the state of the subject animal/bird, BUT trying to deduce migratory behaviour (out of all things) from a bunch of observational data collected from birds in cages is stretching it too far IMHO.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
> to help make up for sleep lost during marathon night flights, migratory birds take hundreds of powernaps during the day, each lasting only a few seconds
Yep, just like my crazy uncle. But instead of gliding, he uses the cruise control.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
Humans do the same thing. The term is "microsleep", lasting from 2 to 30 seconds or so, often with eyes open. A quick search returns hundreds of PDFs on the phenomenon.
As usual, there is a WikiPedia entry (not very useful) and this site too: http://www.sleepdex.org/microsleep.htm
Hmmm... people do it. Birds do it. I'll be shocked when the research is published that fish do it too.
Space and Computers.
I wouldn't consider this to be an impressive evolved behaviour, so much as just what happens when a bird in flight is pushing itself to its limits of endurance. There just aren't many animals other than humans and avians that ever find themselves having to maintain such prolonged alertness to survive, so this is seen as a phenomenon. Try keeping squirrels on a wire over a pit of spikes or something, and you'll probably observe the same behaviour.
Meta will eat itself
...is that birds are on a constant exercise-regiment while the trend with humans is that they become more and more sedentary, behind their PCs, xboxes, or otherwise. I'm just saying this because some "productivity-gurus" may draw the conclusion that we should follow birds' examples. If we ditched our cars and started running everywhere, on the other hand... zzz
Some birds never touch ground during their life. Eat, sleep, all in the air.
http://verkiezingen2006.nl/
woodpeckers don't
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How, exactly, is a 'powernap' any different from a generic nap? I expect Bullshit Bingo from the WSJ, not from scientists.
Great! Now I can finally catch up on some Zzz's buring class without the prof knowing!
Reminds me of the Uberman sleep method.
I believe swifts are able to fly with half their brain asleep
Digg featured the same story just the other day. It was on another website, but presented the same facts. But, as opposed to Slashdot, they ran the article under the headline "Most flirtatious avatar". Somehow, I find that funny.
Basilisk Digital
FTA, these swallows sleep for "9 seconds on average". ... 0+1/2*32*9*9 feet ... 1296 feet.
.
If one stops flying completely for 9 seconds, the approximate distance it would fall is s = ut + 1/2at**2
But the barn swallow typically migrates within within 100 feet of the ground
So how do they avoid crashing?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
"In migration along the coast, the Swainson's Thrush has been reported from sea level to about 800m [2624 feet] elevation." So they seems to be flying dangerously low if they do stop flying while sleeping, but not impossibly low. I wonder how many do crash?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Billy thrush was killed this morning when he fell asleep at the wing and flew into a 747 jet engine.
Timmy thrush was trajically killed when he also fell asleep at the wing and flew into some power lines and was electricuted.
Sam Thrush was killed today when he did not get enough sleep and saw what he thought was a worm on the ground and it ended up being a snake and the snake ate him.
that is all from Thrush news...
The opening of the article states that the birds fly at night, which leaves little time for sleep.
Sure, if you discount the other half of the day.
I have to agree with the other commenters who pointed out that this is a good example of how watching a bird take naps in a cage may not be the best kind of science. For all we know, the birds in the wild are enjoying a hearty day's sleep, completely undisturbed by pesky lab techs trying to peer into their cage and see what they're doing. You keep looking at me while scribbling on a clipboard, and I'll have trouble sleeping, too.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Urban legend -- albatrosses sleep on the surface, not in flight.
_ and_flight
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albatross#Morphology
First of all, experiments I've read about have been done on birds that are flying, hence no cage.
More importantly, though, although you must accept the inevitability of sleep, nonetheless you assume that sleep is a behavior and that behavior can be affected by a cage. Well, the view that sleep is behavior has no scientific basis, in spite of the fact that we (as do other animals) have some control over when we sleep, which is, well, totally beside the point. The fact remains that we, and all animals, MUST sleep and we cannot change that. If we don't sleep, our immune and nervous systems shut down and we die. This is true of all animals.
The latest science indicates beyond any doubt that sleep has nothing to do with behavior but is, rather, a metabolic state (anabolism) which is, of course, cell-based and which, therefore, cannot be affected by putting a bird in a cage or by attaching a neuro-transmitter to a flying bird.
Studies of this kind, therefore, do NOT lose credibility because it is not behavior which is being tested, but rather it is what is being tested is a simple measurement of how the catabolic - anabolic (awake - asleep) balance is maintained in birds, in particular.
It's too bad everybody seems to think that either this is just a humorous article or that they aren't interested enough in understanding what sleep is to spend a few minutes either thinking about what sleep really is, or reading about it. Sleep is important enough that if you try to do without it you will soon be rendered useless and die. Understanding sleep can make your life better. Not getting good sleep makes your life hell, if it doesn't kill you. You can't alter the basic metabolism of life by deciding that you are somehow special and you can't understand sleep if you simply dismiss it as behavior.
In the article it states: "Some scientists speculate that some birds might even be able to catch up on some forms of sleep while in flight, but this idea has yet to be fully tested.".
/. after all where nobody reads the article and makes hilarious comments anyway.
The article is not even about sleeping while flying, they are talking entirely of the bird's sleep states during the daytime (and then the birds would fly at night). But, what do I expect? This is
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Here's another story on migratory birds: http://wwwa.accuweather.com/news-blogs.asp?partner =accuweather&traveler=0&blog=bilo. If someone reads it, let me know what the article is about!
Ergo. Anyone who sleeps for short periods during the daytime is a bird brain.
Have you read my journal today?
Its remarkable our nervous system shares several properties with bird, since the split was 200 million years ago. By evolutionary standars humans are practically cousins with mice, perhaps splitting only 60 million years ago.
Despite this, theres evidence some birds can processes some symbols, and perform simple counting. They dont seem to have the emotional range of mammals.
Brrrrmmmm
Yawn...Must not sleep at wheel...
(sound of car hitting rumble strip)
Who!? What? Oh yah, must stay awake (turns up radio)
Zzzzz...
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If the birds can gain the same benefit from multiple, very short, sessions of sleep that we can only gain from large chunks of sleep it makes you wonder if the restorative processes are similar. Clearly they are not acieving REM.
This isn't how I learnt it at veterinary school. Migratory birds are capable of sleeping with only one half of their brains at a time. You can tell which half is sleeping - the contra-lateral eye is closed.
A similar thing happens in cetacea (e.g. dolphins and porpoises) who also exhibit hemispheric sleep, which eye is closed is not a reliable indicator of which side is asleep.
Both these observations were made by examining EEG recordings of the animal during sleep.
Functionally, this micro-power-naps explanation may be equivalent to the hemispheric sleep in migratory birds, but I would question the working definition of sleep they were using. Whilst powernapping may be a comforting anthropocentric theory, it is not suitable for dolphins, since they need to swim up to the surface to breath, and avoid nocturnal predators. Other posters have given back of the envelope calculations why it may not be suitable for low altitude migrating birds either.
I wonder how many MILLIONS they wasted to find out this bullshit!
They could have put that money towards cancer research!
"When I was a student I also took several power-naps during the day to make up for lack of sleep.
They were called lectures."
Very expensive naps.
"This is true of all animals."
Do plants sleep, and why not? How about bacteria? Worms? Flies?
Am I the only person who misread this as 'powerups'?
I know how these birds feel, though my seconds-long powernaps usually occur while reading /. even though - zzz ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
- How do dolphins sleep?
- Dolphins have to be conscious to breath. This means that they cannot go into a full deep sleep, because then they would suffocate. Dolphins have "solved" that by letting one half of their brain sleep at a time. This has been determined by doing EEG studies on dolphins. Dolphins sleep about 8 hours day in this fashion.
Damn. I wish I could do that.It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If they're so smart, why do they live in igloos?
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
They're just duty-cycling.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
How come migratory birds have longer hours than us humans? They aren't flying that fast, are they?
"Sleep apnea + foreign objects lodged in bodily openings --> Bad happenings."
Nightime is not playtime.
"Dolphins have "solved" that by letting one half of their brain sleep at a time. "
That must have been the quickest "evolution" in history
"I'm drowning! I'm drowning! *POP!* No I'm not! No I'm not!"
---
"It's been 19 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
Slashdot TRM gets defeated again!
Interesting. My cat does the same thing.
:wq
Reminds me of the Uberman's sleep cycle, sleep 30 mins every 4 hours, it's been on /. a few times...I don't think I can do it because I tend to go out and have drinks on the weekends...
0
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/15/103358/72
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
Was "When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like my Uncle Harold. Not screaming in terror like his passengers"
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
...funny. That sounds a lot like high school.
Sleep.. during high school? Never heard of it.
How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A fish.
Yes, these stories are false.
You're right. This correlation has been established, as have a whole host of other such correlations between sleep and health.
Sometimes a very ill patient is deliberately put into a coma for the fact that it is a deep-healing state. A fetus sleeps nearly all the time because sleep is the growth state, and because it has no need to be awake, not to find food, not to have to ingest it, not to expel it and certainly not to procreate. Same situation with animals that are born from eggs.
Doctors are, generally, poorly trained to recognize the symptoms of sleep apnea (apnoea). They typically misinterpret its symptoms and, as a result, prescribe medications for illnesses patients don't even have. Estimates of the frequency of this common problem (obstructive sleep apnea) are as high as 5% of the adult population. Sleep, its importance and its nature, are vast and fascinating topics.