A study published in Science magazine shows that chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus) doze off more than 10,000 times a day, with an average bout of sleep lasting about 4 seconds. For a human, going on like this sounds like something resulting from being a victim of sleep deprivation torture. But for the tiny penguins, this appears to be perfectly normal, and an evolutionary adaptation. What further attests to it, is that during the period of tending to eggs, the number of naps increases, while their duration drops. And it appears to allow the penguins to get the rest they need.

“This is what was the most striking and interesting — the fact that they can deal with sleeping in a fragmented way continuously, day and night,” said Paul-Antoine Libourel, a sleep ecophysiologist at the Neuroscience Research Center of Lyon in Bron, France, who was a co-author of the study.

Not only birds but also mammals can engage in microsleeps, although these bursts tend to be shorter in the former. But no one expected that an animal could go on for an extended period of time without a period of continuous sleep. But none of the power naps exceeded 34 seconds.

“That these penguins are doing very well with such short sleep bouts is really amazing,” said Madeleine Scriba, a biologist based in Ettenhausen, Switzerland.

The study, which was conducted on 14 penguins nesting in a colony on King George Island off of Antarctica over a period of ten days, showed that the penguins’ micro power naps add up to between 11 and 12 hours a day. Perhaps even more interestingly, the research has shown that not all of the penguin’s brain necessarily falls asleep at the same time. It is also possible that only one hemisphere snoozes, while the other one remains awake.

The outcome of the study has prompted some researchers to think about how this affects what know about sleep in general.

“How would this then build up? And would they find a difference for non-breeding birds?” asked Tessa van Walsum, a marine biologist based in London.

If chinstrap penguins can go on the way they do, can other creatures also obtain sufficient rest in situations where they need to remain awake?

“We don’t know whether the benefits of microsleep are the same in penguins and other mammals [such as] rats and humans,” Libourel says. However, “the study shows that at least one species is able to sleep like this and behave normally, so I don’t see why other species couldn’t evolve the same sleep adaptation.”

One way or the other, neither chinstrap penguins nor any other creature that possesses the ability to regenerate with frequent bouts of micro power naps, should probably be allowed to operate heavy machinery.