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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."
"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
woodpeckers don't
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Reminds me of the Uberman sleep method.
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
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
I think technically, they hatch *when* they hit the ground.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai