2023-12-22 16:00:00
Reindeer need less sleep after ruminating. Your brain waves during rumination are similar to those during deep sleep, according to a new study.
This means the animals can eat almost around the clock in summer. “There are extreme conditions in the reindeer’s habitat. In the Arctic winter it is frozen and the reindeer have difficulty finding food,” explained Melanie Furrer from the University Children’s Hospital Zurich.
To prepare for this, the animals spend almost the whole day eating in the summer. Furrer and her colleagues wanted to find out what this means for the reindeer’s sleep. Until now, little was known about the animals’ sleeping behavior. “Before us, no one had ever measured reindeer sleep using EEG,” said Furrer. EEG (electroencephalography) will be used to measure the electrical activity of the brain.
For the study published on Friday in the journal “Current Biology”, Furrer traveled to Norway with electrodes and small EEG devices that are otherwise needed to measure people’s sleep. They wanted to stick these electrodes on the heads of the reindeer at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø in order to measure their brain waves.
“We didn’t know whether it would work,” said Furrer. But it did: “When I looked at the first recording, I thought at first that I had accidentally caught a recording of a human being,” said Furrer. The researchers carried out these sleep measurements at different times of the year. They found that reindeer sleep about the same amount in winter, summer and autumn. “That was unexpected,” said Furrer. “We thought that they also sleep more in the winter, when they are more inactive and conserve energy.”
The measurements of brain waves during rumination explained how the reindeer manage to get enough sleep despite increased activity in the summer: These looked as if the animals were in deep sleep. “Reindeer save time by meeting their sleep and digestive needs at the same time,” explained Furrer.
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