Article: To sleep or not to sleep: the ecology of sleep in artificial organisms.(Research article)

Authors: Alberto Acerbi (corresponding author) [1]; Patrick McNamara [2]; Charles L Nunn [1,3]

Background

Sleep is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike activities such as mating, foraging and seeking shelter, the functional benefits of sleep are unclear, and the costs of sleep appear to be substantial. Most animals thus far studied exhibit some kind of sleep, including fruitflies [1], jellyfish [2], birds [3], reptiles [4] and mammals [5]. Animals exhibit incredible variation in the duration of sleep. In mammals, for example, the armadillo ( Chaetophractus villous ) can sleep up to 20 hours per day [6], while a giraffe (

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