Q: Do insects sleep?
Q: Do insects sleep?
A: Well, we’re not really sure. While scientists have an easy time observing dogs and cats sleeping – like humans they sometimes snore or twitch in their sleep – it’s harder to tell what a ladybug or a beetle might be doing when it slows down, according to Tom Turpin, a Purdue Extension entomologist.
One manner in which researchers have attempted to measure this question involves observing insect activity. Sleep, in most animals, involves a slowing of physiological processes like heart rate and breathing.
And while researchers can’t confirm that insects sleep (it’s a bit hard to monitor their brain waves), they at least agree that the insects appear to go comatose sometimes, wrote Turpin in the school’s Agricultural Communications newsletter.
These slow-downs can come from a variety of sources, though. Some insects slow down as temperatures drop, and some of these bugs, including lady bugs, even hibernate.
Daytime insects also slow down at night. Monarch butterflies, wrote Turpin, appear to sleep during their southbound migrations, grouping in bunches at nightfall and folding their wings before the next day’s flight.
Other scientists postulate that “death feigning,” an animal behavior commonly referred to as “playing opossum,” is actually a form of sleep. Species of crustaceans, reptiles, birds and insects all engage in this behavior to varying degrees.
Cutworms and sowbugs curl into balls, feigning death when they’re disturbed, and some beetles retract their legs, fall from a plant and lie on their backs, wrote Turpin.
Most of these episodes are short – a few minutes – but some insects keep their eyes on the prize. The world’s record for feigning belongs to a giant water bug that played dead for eight full hours, according to Turpin.
– Melania Zaharopoulos,
Staff Writer
