r/interestingasfuck • u/DearEmphasis4488 • 1d ago

Animals sleep time

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

13.0k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

666 comments sorted by

View all comments

24

u/baelrog 1d ago

Why do large herbivores sleep so little?

Sleep also doesn’t seem to be correlated with intelligence as Elephants are very intelligent creatures but has very different need for sleep with other intelligent creatures on the list.

29

u/Myrsky4 1d ago

I am no expert but have several ideas - carnivores have an easier time resting as they can gorge and then go into little food comas while digesting and not starve. If your main source of calories is plants you have a lot more eating you need to do, it's also for those same reasons that it's basically impossible to gorge in the wild for an herbivore.

In addition some animals make it so they rest parts of their brain at a time(famously sharks and marine mammals do this) - elephants may have similar mechanisms so they can be alert more

Those are my thoughts but again, not an expert

14

u/Maultaschtyrann 1d ago

Good explanation! Big herbivores need to be feeding constantly. The carnivores actually are the other way around. They need to sleep through as much of the suboptimal times to hunt to conserve energy for when they hunt.

1

u/xXProGenji420Xx 1d ago

because their food is less energy dense. putting aside things like patrolling their territory, a big cat only needs to be awake long enough to score one kill, then it can eat its fill over the course of maybe an hour. an herbivore eating leaves or grass needs to be eating for hours on end to get its fill of calories. most of those 20 hours spent awake are going to involve grazing and foraging.

1

u/BethanyG12123 1d ago

I'd say prey animals versus predators. Gotta keep moving and stay on alert