Do bed bugs sleep?
Because if they do I say it’s high time we bite them back!
Hey there sleeping pill bugs, Julian here for DNews.
We’re still not exactly sure why we need to sleep but almost every animal does it.
Humans, cats, dogs, cats, birds, cats, even fish and cats!
So just how deep does the rabbit hole go?
Do insects, for instance, need a little shut compound-eye?
It’s not an easy question to answer because it’s not like bugs have eyelids they can
actually close and we still haven’t devised tiny brain wave scanners that can detect a
resting pattern.
So scientists had to define what insect sleep looks like, and in 2000 they did just that.
Two separate groups from the Neuroscience Institute of California and the University
of Pennsylvania studied fruit flies to see if they behaved similarly to us.
The researchers found that at night, they were immobile and had a higher arousal threshold,
meaning it took more than usual to startle them and get them moving5.
The scientists also found that if they deprived the flies of sleep at night by continually
tapping the container they were in, the flies would rest during the day, exhibiting “sleep
rebound.”
If you’ve ever worked all night and then slept like a log in a coma the whole day,
you can relate to the flies.
And if you used caffeine to pull an all nighter, the flies can relate to you: turns out the
chemical that keeps us buzzing does the same for fruit flies.4
Since the first observations of fruit fly sleep in 2000 more insects have been caught
napping.
The males of some species of bees that don’t live in hives sleep by locking their jaws
onto a flower and relaxing the rest of their body.
They exhibit the same change in arousal threshold: as you can see in this video, when this sleeping
bee is poked, it lazily waves a leg like it’s asking for 5 more minutes.
And if bees are kept awake, they show the same negative side effects we do.
Biologist Barrett Klein studies the sleep of bees and invented a device called the Insominator,
which is officially the best name for anything ever.
Klein would tag some bees with steel and some with copper.
The Insominator would keep the steel-clad bees awake by jarring them with magnets.
Meanwhile, bees tagged with non-magnetic copper would be unaffected.
The next day when the steel-clad sleepy bees had to communicate where flowers were by doing
the waggle dance -- yes that’s the official name -- they weren’t as accurate as their
well rested brethren.
Sleep deprivation makes bees a little muddled, just like us.
And if it goes on for too long, it can have worse consequences.
A study that kept fruit flies awake for an extended period saw a third of them die.
So extreme sleep deprivation can be fatal for insects, just like us.
Some researchers think if it doesn’t outright kill them, it can shorten a bug’s life span.
A University of South Florida study of fire ants found that queens get much more rest
than the workers.
The queens would regularly doze off 90 times a day for 6 minutes at a time, which adds
up to 9 hours.
Workers on the other hand took minute long power naps at random, 250 times a day.
That adds up to less than 5 hours.
Incidentally, workers only live up to a year, while queens can live for up to 6 years.
The worker ants sleeping pattern means that 80% of the colony is awake at any given time
so they can continuously get stuff done.13 Other insects sleep when there’s not much
point in being awake: flowers close up at night, so honeybees can catch some zzzzs.
Humans aren’t on mattresses during the day so bed bugs sleep then.
The New Zealand weta lives at an altitude where it freezes overnight so it might as
well go into cryosleep.
And spiders…
Spiders aren’t insects, they never sleep.
They’re always watching.
Kidding… probably.
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Hey remember how I mentioned fish sleep and you were really curious as to how that’s
even possible?
Well Trace and Dr. Kiki Sanford tell you all about it here.
Before we brought it up I bet you never wondered if insects sleep, but these are the questions
that keep us up at night.
If you have your own you’d like us to answer, ask us!