Research has already shown that larger mammals tend to sleep less than smaller mammals. But doing this in elephants borders on surgically impossible because of the large frontal sinus that makes up most of their skull.
To overcome this our comparative neurobiology group at the University of the Witwatersrand, with colleagues from Elephants Without Borders and UCLA adapted an activity meter used in studies of human sleep.
This allowed us to monitor the sleeping patterns and habits of two wild elephant matriarchs. By understanding sleep across animals we can gain insights into improving the quality of human sleep and our quality of life. But just as crucially, understanding sleep in animals like elephants helps us to understand them better — and improves our ability to develop beneficial conservation and management strategies. The device we used provides an output of the number of acceleration events per minute.
After observing elephants in the wild, we realised that the most active part of the body was the trunk. Combining this with a GPS collar and gyroscope — which measured bodily movements in the x, y and z planes , we made four really interesting observations:. Existing research done on captive elephants found that they slept on average between four and six hours a day.
A large elephant needs to eat around kg of low quality food daily. This leaves little time for sleep.
You can read more about this phenomenon here and here. For now Khanyisa is still spending her sleeping hours in the nursery with Lammie and her blanket as the cold weather creates a need for us to be much more cautious of her health and wellness. She sleeps like a human baby with interrupted sleeping patterns but the long walks in the wild all day with the herd certainly make her sleep about an hour extra.
While Lundi or an allomother elephant could provide her with natural elephant warmth in the Jabulani herd stables, her health has been intermittently affected by diarrhea and we need to ensure that she is as strong as Sebakwe! While supplementing her milk with a tried, tested and tweaked formula, we have made sure to weigh her frequently and keep track on her health, which has been easy to do with the help of our team as we are well-equipped in the orphanage with the necessary equipment.
Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Rainbow dreams with Khanyisa. These small devices—the scientific version of Fitbits—record movement, and researchers can use them to measure how well volunteers are sleeping. By analyzing their data, and looking for five-minute windows when the trunks were still, Gravett could deduce when the elephants were asleep.
And she found that they slept for just two hours a day on average—the lowest duration for any animal thus far recorded. Sleep supersedes a lot of our survival instincts. Manger has been studying sleeping animals for almost two decades.
He began with, of all things, the platypus , which turned out to get more rapid eye movement REM sleep—the type in which dreams occur—than any other animal. From that quirky start, Manger went on to study sleeping dolphins, whales, hippos, echidnas, cats, and antelopes.
But most of that research involved captive animals, which enjoy plentiful food and an absence of predators. For those reasons, they sleep much more than their wild cousins.
For example, in the s , scientists found that captive three-toed sloths sleep for 16 hours a day—a result that earned them a reputation for, well, sloth. In , when other researchers recorded the brain activity of wild sloths, he found that they only sleep for 10 hours a day. Manger also wanted to take the science of sleep into the wild. And he started with elephants.
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