Why chinstrap penguins sleep thousands of times a day

Sleep is a bit of an . A sleeping animal cannot look for food, defend its territory, flee from danger or find a mate. The fact that sleep is nonetheless ubiquitous among animals suggests its restorative powers are essential. So does the fact that, if laboratory animals are deprived of it for long enough, they die.Some animals, though, try to have their cake and eat it. Dolphins and ducks can sleep with only half their brains at a time, leaving the other half alert. Now a paper in by Paul-Antoine Libourel from the Lyon Centre for Research in Neurosciences, and Won Young Lee from the Korea Polar Research Institute, reports another ingenious dodge. Chinstrap penguins, it seems, take their sleep in the form of thousands of tiny micro-naps—or at least, they do when they are nesting.