It’s a question that keeps some scientists awake at night: do spiders sleep? Dr Daniela Roessler and her colleagues set up cameras to record baby jumping spiders at night to find out. The videos showed patterns that looked a lot like sleep cycles: the spiders’ legs twitched(抽搐) and parts of their eyes flickered(闪烁). The researchers described this pattern as a “REM sleep-like state”.
In humans, REM—or rapid eye movement—is an active phase of sleep when parts of the brain light up with activity. It is closely linked with dreaming. Some animals, including some birds and mammals, have also been shown to experience REM sleep. But Dr Roessler, said creatures like the jumping spider hadn’t received as much attention, so it wasn’t known if they got the same kind of sleep.
Dr Roessler and her team dug into the sleep question after she discovered the spiders hanging at night from threads of silk in their lab containers. She had recently caught some jumping spiders to study, a common species with a brown body and four pairs of big eyes.
They found the spiders’ overnight movements looked a lot like REM in other species—like dogs or cats twitching in their sleep. And they happened in regular cycles, similar to sleep patterns in humans. Study co-author Dr Paul Shamble, from Harvard University, said many species similar to spiders didn’t have movable eyes, which made it hard to compare their sleep cycles. But he said jumping spiders were predators(捕食性动物) that moved their retinas around while hunting.
Dr Roessler said the researchers still had to figure out if the spiders were technically sleeping while they were in these resting states. That included testing whether they responded more slowly —or not at all—to triggers(诱因) that would normally set them off.
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