Elephant Seals Sleep Deep Diving Spiral
Unlike translucent glass frogs, elephant seals sleep upside down for just 2-hours a day while in a deep diving spiral. These short naps deep below the surface allows them to evade predators and during their months at sea, they rival the record for the least sleep among all mammals, currently held by African elephants, which also sleep just 2-hours per day.



Elephant seals sleep during these drift dives to evade sharks and killer whales. When they’re at the surface in the open ocean, they spend just a minute or two breathing in between dives. Since they have a very large volume of blood, they are able to hold a large amount of oxygen for use when diving. It also helps that they have sinuses in their abdominal veins to hold blood and can store oxygen in their muscles with increased myoglobin concentrations.

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Elephant Seals Sleep Deep Diving Spiral

It doesn’t seem possible that they would truly go into paralytic REM sleep during a dive, but it tells us something about the decision-making processes of these seals to see where in the water column they feel safe enough to go to sleep,” said Terrie Williams, Director of Comparative Neurophysiology Lab at UCSC.

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