In this new study, Gelstetto and his colleagues found that the life span of sleep-deprived male fruit flies is the same as that of ordinary fruit flies, while the life span of sleep-deprived female fruit flies is shortened-but only by 3 days on average. For fruit flies with a life span of 40 to 50 days, 3 days is only 6% to 8% of their life span. This study deserves attention because it is different from other research methods used to study the sleep of fruit flies. "If fruit flies are inactive, other researchers will think that they are sleeping," Gelstetto said. However, there may be many reasons for the fruit fly to enter the static state. Besides sleeping, it may be eating or cleaning yourself. Gail Stowe's team designed a brand-new device to monitor this tiny movement of fruit flies. If the fruit flies stay still for more than 20 seconds, the device will automatically rotate to "wake them up".
However, due to the 20-second delay, "fruit flies can naturally sleep for a while," Gelstetto said. And although they don't have much sleep time, their physical condition seems to be fine. "Do animals really need sleep? The relevant scientific literature is incomplete. Previous studies often rely on scaring animals and forcing them to wake up, which obviously makes them nervous. Although the dogs, penguins, mice, cockroaches and fruit flies who participated in this kind of research eventually died, what really killed them may not be lack of sleep, but the pressure of being forced to stay awake. In the future research on whether sleep is a necessity, "it is very important to establish a mechanism to eliminate stress as much as possible," Gelstetto said.
This study helps scientists understand a very important point: sleep may not be as important as food for survival-in other words, lack of sleep does not kill animals. And this is contrary to the common sense now. Although it is difficult to prove this hypothesis, it is of positive significance to the medical care of human sleep disorders and disorders. The fruit flies studied by Gelstetto's team are very safe in the laboratory environment. The team said that in the real world, fruit flies are likely to be too … sleepy to survive. However, some animals can survive for a long time without much sleep. In 20 16, Niels Rattenborg of Max Planck Institute in Germany and his colleagues published a paper saying that some migratory birds can sleep in the air, but they don't have much time to do so-maybe about an hour a day.
All animals sleep in some form. But at present, there is no universal principle to explain why some animals need long sleep (such as cats, who sleep most of the day) and some animals only need a small amount of sleep (such as Mexican cave fish, who only sleep for 2 hours a day).