Do Lizards Dream of Ectothermic Sheep?
Perhaps they do not dream of sheep, but it seems as though reptiles are definitely dreaming of something!
A recent research study found that lizards, specifically bearded dragons, were exhibiting sleep patterns very similar to humans. It was discovered that the lizards had several different stages of sleep, just like people do, including slow wave and REM (rapid-eye movement) sleep. Dreaming typically takes place during REM, and up until this study, only mammals and birds were believed to be capable of this behavior.
There are some noticeable differences between human sleep and lizards though. A human typically undergoes REM sleep four or five times each night, however the experiment concluded that the lizards were entering REM around 350 times during each sleep cycle (typically only lasting around 80 seconds)!
So what do bearded dragons dream of? It’s impossible to say for certain, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t hypotheses:
"If you forced me to speculate and to use a loose definition of dreaming, I'd speculate that those dreams are about recent notable events: insects, maybe a place where there are good insects, an aggressive male in the next terrarium, et cetera. If I were an Australian dragon living in Frankfurt, I'd be dreaming of a warm day in the sun." -Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Germany. Credit
So why is this study important? Until now, we only believed that mammals and avians were capable of this kind of sleep. With the realization that lizards experience a very similar sleep cycle, we can conclude that these sleep patterns emerged from an ancient common ancestor between lizards, birds and mammals. Researchers concluded that the behavior likely first appeared in amniotes, a distant ancestor that lived around 320 million years ago!
This is an extremely exciting find for herpetologists. It’s a revolutionary conclusion that not only changes much of what we know about reptiles and their sleep habits, but challenges our views about the evolution of our own behaviors! Thanks to this single study, we are able to determine that dreaming has occurred for millions more years than we ever expected! Source
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Check out my wife's first @introduceyourself post here! (She'll be posting about the cute and fuzzy critters!)
Thank you , I always say our dogs are dreaming when their legs start to twitch and they do little barks...another great post
It is very interesting how similar some animals that seem so different are to us. I have always been tripped out that dogs are seemingly similar to us yet their life span is radically shorter than ours. But then certain coy fish, some whales, and some lizards can live longer than us.
nice post
learned somethin new!
Thanks for this second post :)
Happy to see the Curie project took my suggestion and supported you! Great post!
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