The massive marine mammals go into a cruise-control corkscrew during their submarine slumbers.
half-hour dives, sleeping about 10 minutes at a time.Graphic by Jessica Kendall-Bar“We think that the seals are passively drifting during this time and that the corkscrew/spiral pattern is a hydrodynamic result of a falling object in water—
much like how a falling leaf pitches up and down as it spins in a spiral,” said Jessie Kendall-Bar, an evolutionary biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the study’s lead author, in an email to Gizmodo. “While in slow-wave sleep, they are able to maintain postural control and do seem to generally maintain a heading and glide down in a straight line, but sometimes they also turn upside down during slow-wave sleep and begin to spiral,” Kendall-Bar added.Kendall-Bar designed an electroencephalogram system that could record the seals even at depths in the open water, as well as devices that recorded the seals’ positioning and speed over the course of their trips.
The team found the seals entered rapid-eye movement sleep only when they corkscrewed through the water. Theythis was due to the seals entering a state of sleep paralysis when they went into REM sleep, causing them to take on a different pattern of movement.
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