A study suggests spiders may sleep like humans...

[DGUtley]

A study suggests spiders may sleep like humans...

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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. The researchers described this pattern as a “REM sleep-like state.” In humans, REM, or rapid eye movement, is an active phase of sleep when parts of the brain light up with activity and is closely linked with dreaming. 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.

Their findings were published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 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. She had recently scooped up some jumping spiders to study, a common species with a furry brown body and four pairs of big eyes.


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[Cotton1]

Unless all Spiders jump and depending upon where they come from I may have recently had an encounter with a couple of them.

[Dr. Who]

Unless all Spiders jump and depending upon where they come from I may have recently had an encounter with a couple of them.

There are 6,000 species of jumping spider, 2 of which are native to Arkansas, so they were likely jumping spiders.

[MisterVeritis]

If spiders sleep like people I recommend the My Pillow Mattress Topper.

[Peter1469]

It was funny to read what the science chick who saw this said. Something like at first I thought they were dead....