Along the rocky and ice-free Antarctic coastline, chinstrap penguins by the millions form bustling breeding colonies — chaotic, noisy and, yes, smelly — every year, laying eggs in November that hatch in late December and January.
Guarding their nests is serious business for these midsize penguins, with predatory seabirds called brown skuas on the prowl. Falling asleep on the job can spell doom for the eggs and later the chicks. But this species, scientists said on Thursday, has devised an ingenious way of getting sufficient sleep without compromising vigilance.
The researchers documented extreme sleep behavior in these flightless birds. Rather than sleeping for prolonged periods during the nesting period, chinstraps nod off thousands of times daily — for only around four seconds at a time — and meet their sleep needs cumulatively, amassing about 11 hours per day.
“They show an unexpected sleep adaptation, a tradeoff between the need to sleep and the need to be awake,” said ecophysiologist Paul-Antoine Libourel of the Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre in France, lead author of the research published in the journal Science.
“This…
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