Power naps for penguin parents
Some people think having a nap during the day leaves them feeling a bit groggy and grumpy. Not chinstrap penguins, though – they seem to love a sneaky snooze. In fact, a new study found they love napping so much they have more than 10,000 mini sleeps every day.
The inspiration for the study came from a researcher who noticed that during breeding season chinstrap penguins kept blinking and apparently falling asleep. To find out if the birds really were nodding off, a team of researchers observed a group of 14 chinstrap penguins living on King George Island in Antarctica.
The team fitted them with sensors that could detect their brain waves and filmed the birds continuously. The researchers could detect if the penguins were napping by recording sleeprelated brain activity or watching when their eyes closed.
The team found that the penguins have thousands of naps a day, which are an average of four seconds long. The longest recorded nap was 34 seconds. All of those short sleeps add up to 11 hours of snoozing a day.
Although the naps may seem odd, there’s a reason behind this behaviour. Chinstrap penguins often sit on their nests alone while their partners go searching for food. Snatching tiny naps help them to keep an almost constant eye on their nests, so they can protect their young chicks from threats. Parents who hadn’t yet hatched their eggs had even shorter mini sleeps because they needed to be more alert.
Scientists already knew that many birds often sleep in short bursts – although not as short as the chinstrap penguins. Scientist Madeleine Scriba thinks the penguins probably need to have some continuous sleep to stay healthy. Even so, Scriba said it is “really amazing” that the penguins seem to manage so well for so long on just mini snoozes.