It's a question that keeps some scientists awake at night: Do spiders sleep?
Daniela Roessler and her colleagues trained cameras on baby jumping spiders at night to find out. The footage showed patterns that looked a lot like sleep cycles: The spiders' legs twitched and parts of their eyes flickered.
Other animals, including some birds and mammals, have been shown to experience REM sleep. But creatures like the jumping spider haven't gotten as much attention so it wasn't known if they got the same kind of sleep, said Roessler, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany.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.
But these jumping spiders are predators that move their retinas around to change their gaze while they hunt, Shamble said. Plus, the young spiders have a see-through outer layer that gives a clear window into their bodies.The researchers still have to figure out if the spiders are technically sleeping while they're in these resting states, Roessler said. That includes testing whether they respond more slowly - or not at all - to triggers that would normally set them off.
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