Chinstrap penguins fall asleep 10,000 times a DAY – but only snooze for four seconds at a time, study finds

The feeling of falling asleep during the day – even for a short period – is very common.

Whether it's in a boring work meeting, on the train home, or even while watching TV, we've all had times when we snatched away a few seconds of sleep.

But that's nothing compared to chinstrap penguins, which nap about 10,000 times a day, according to new research.

In the wild, penguins get more than 11 hours of sleep a day, but not all at once, it turns out.

New observations reveal that animals fall asleep thousands of times a day, but for only four seconds at a time.

This allows them to accumulate their daily sleep needs while remaining constantly alert on their nests, the researchers said.

The team, from the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center and the Korea Polar Research Institute, recorded sleep behavior in a belted penguin colony in Antarctica.

They used remote electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring and other non-invasive sensors to see how the animals got their sleep.

The analysis, published in the journal Science, revealed that the birds did not engage in long periods of sleep, and instead slept frequently – about 10,000 “short sleeps” per day lasting just four seconds.

According to the authors, the results suggest that, given the reproductive success of these penguins, the benefits of sleep can accrue incrementally.

An accompanying “Perspectives” article, written by experts from the University of California, San Diego and the University of Oxford, explains that the study raises questions about how much sleep can be changed before its benefits are lost.

“Contrary to the traditional understanding of sleep, penguins do not engage in long, uniform periods of sleep,” they wrote.

“Instead, the birds were observed to fall asleep frequently, accumulating more than 11 hours of sleep per day in thousands of short periods that lasted only four seconds on average, and are therefore called ‘micro-bouts’.”

“The reported data could be one of the most extreme examples of the incremental nature by which sleep benefits can accrue.

“Demonstrating that sleeping this way comes at no cost to the penguin would challenge the current interpretation of fragmentation as inherently detrimental to sleep quality.”