Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA.
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA.
Science. 2023 Apr 21;380(6642):260-265. doi: 10.1126/science.adf0566. Epub 2023 Apr 20.
Sleep is a crucial part of the daily activity patterns of mammals. However, in marine species that spend months or entire lifetimes at sea, the location, timing, and duration of sleep may be constrained. To understand how marine mammals satisfy their daily sleep requirements while at sea, we monitored electroencephalographic activity in wild northern elephant seals () diving in Monterey Bay, California. Brain-wave patterns showed that seals took short (less than 20 minutes) naps while diving (maximum depth 377 meters; 104 sleeping dives). Linking these patterns to accelerometry and the time-depth profiles of 334 free-ranging seals (514,406 sleeping dives) revealed a North Pacific sleepscape in which seals averaged only 2 hours of sleep per day for 7 months, rivaling the record for the least sleep among all mammals, which is currently held by the African elephant (about 2 hours per day).
睡眠是哺乳动物日常活动模式的重要组成部分。然而，对于那些在海上生活数月甚至一生的海洋物种来说，它们的睡眠地点、时间和持续时间可能会受到限制。为了了解海洋哺乳动物在海上如何满足其日常睡眠需求，我们监测了在加利福尼亚州蒙特雷湾潜水的野生北象海豹（）的脑电图活动。脑电波模式表明，海豹在潜水时会进行短暂（不到 20 分钟）的小睡（最大潜水深度 377 米；104 次睡眠潜水）。将这些模式与加速度计和 334 只自由游动海豹的时间-深度曲线（514,406 次睡眠潜水）联系起来，揭示了北太平洋的睡眠景观，海豹在 7 个月的时间里平均每天只睡 2 小时，这与所有哺乳动物中睡眠时间最短的记录相媲美，目前由非洲象（每天约 2 小时）保持。
