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The common swift (Apus apus) is a remarkable bird found all over Europe, northern Asia and Africa. Because it migrates into sub-Saharan Africa, and because roost sites have never been found there, some scientists have speculated that it stays aloft during its entire non-breeding season.
A group of Swedish scientists attached data loggers, light sensors, and accelerometers to thirteen common swifts and monitored them for two years. They found that these birds remain airborne for 10 months of their non-breeding periods. All of the birds were airborne >99% of the time, but several didn't land at all during those 10 months. Their work is being published in the journal Current Biology .
Hedenström says that common swifts have adapted to a low-energy lifestyle, but his team does not yet know whether the birds sleep while aloft. "Most animals suffer dramatically from far less sleep loss," says Niels Rattenborg, a neurobiologist at Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany. "But these birds seem to have found a trick through evolution that allows them to get by on far less sleep."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 31 2016, @08:18PM
That is some mind boggling flight time. Must be eating a lot of flying bugs to pull that off. As for sleep, I would guess that they find a good updraft and doze/sleep. Humans can actually pull off a similar stunt when they get good enough at meditation. I'm sure this will sound like hippy nonsense to most of you here, but meditation allows some people to get only a few hours of sleep a night with a few other hours of deep meditation. Sleep is about giving the brain a chance to rest and reset itself, meditation is like the sports of sleeping!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday November 01 2016, @12:39AM
There might be an even simpler solution -> Yo byrd I herd you like flying so I put flying into your dreams so you can fly while you fly.
Seriously, IMHO dreaming is the brain garbage collection. The simplest way to garbage collect is of course during offline mode, because of the lack of race conditions. These birds evolved into getting (read "desired", if you are a Lamarck fan) an online one. They must have lots of deja vu.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday November 01 2016, @01:21AM
With uptime like that they're obviously running Linux or BSD :D
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