10:51:12 
2023-04-26 
552
The African elephant holds the record for sleeping the least of any mammal—about two hours a day—but now, the elephant seal is giving its namesake a run for its money.
Recent experiments measuring brain waves of northern elephant seals in Monterey Bay, California, revealed the animals averaged only two hours of sleep per day during the seven months out of the year it spent at sea. That’s an impressive feat, considering gorillas sleep for 12 hours per day, dogs over 10, and lions up to 20.
Jessi Kenadal-Bar, then a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, discovered the elephant seals’ ability while researching how the large animals, whose males feature a trunk-like nose, sleep hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface.
In the first-ever sleep study on marine mammals in the wild, she found in the open ocean, elephant seals sleep less than two hours per day—while on land, they doze more than 10 hours a day
"They're able to have these sort of dual lifestyles," says Kendall-Bar, a National Geographic Explorer who led a study on the phenomenon published this week in the journal Science . "As far as a mammal that has that degree of flexibility, that's pretty much unprecedented."
It’s still a mystery how elephant seals can survive in the open ocean on so little sleep.
Costa notes that large animals like African elephants have slower metabolic rates, which may mean they can get away with less sleep—possibly the case with elephant seals as well. Williams speculates the seals may postpone the "repair processes" that happen during sleep until they get to the beach and can rest in earnest.
As for Kendall-Bar, rather than call her study a discovery, she considers it a great privilege. "Animals have been doing this for so long, it feels like an honor just to observe that and be let in on this secret.”
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