the Truth of panama alien

The popular image of a lazy sloth who sleeps most of the day was requested.

Rather than snoozing for more than 16 hours per day, as observed in captivity, sloths in the wild doze for less than 10 hours, research suggests.

Scientists caught sloths living in rainforest of Panama and fitted with a device that monitors sleep.

The results, published in a journal of the Royal Society has been able to shed light on sleep disorders of man, they say.

The principal researcher Niels Rattenborg, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, said the study shows for the first time been
can sleep in a wild animal to be monitored.
"The exciting discovery was true that only slept 9.6 hours per day, which is much rarer than people think and less to what is observed in a previous study of sloths in captivity," he told the BBC .

"So we still sloth-like in terms of speed of movement, but in terms of their dream, which seems not to sleep too long.

Work published in the Journal of the Royal Society Biology Letters has been tried, properties, whether an animal sleeps more or less a different type of prediction is. This could provide information on the function of sleep, said Dr. Rattenborg.

He added: "I think the result is the door to a new era of research on sleep in animals sleep in their natural habitat."

The proof of principle

The animals differ in the amount of sleep they need. Pythons, for example, sleep for 18 hours a day, while giraffes survive on just two hours.

They spend much time in the trees


To investigate sleeping patterns in wild sloths, involved scientists from Germany, Switzerland and the United States, a small machine, patterns of brain activity of sleep can identify developed.

They took three women lazy brown neck living in the rainforest near the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Barro Colorado, Iceland, Panama.

The animals were with data loggers, and released.

If you are again a few days later, measurements showed that they slept an average of 9.6 hours per day, compared to a sleep time of 16 hours per day reported in sloths in captivity.

Dr Neil Stanley, an expert on sleep disorders at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, United Kingdom, said the animals sleep longer in captivity, where they tend to all their needs met.

"It is intuitive that animals sleep less s in the wild and in captivity - this technology gives us the opportunity to show the truth," he said.

Despite years of research on the function of sleep, there are still many questions unanswered.

And so widespread that sleep plays an important role in maintaining normal mental functions, but the exact mechanism is unclear.