Study confirms that sharks sleep, even when their eyes are open!
It has been a long held belief that sharks don’t sleep and the reason given for this was that some of them needed to keep swimming in order to have a constant and steady supply of oxygen-rich water go through their gills. Now, a report in smithsonianmag.com mentions that Australian scientists have studied and recorded a species of these fishes which live in the bottom and have been observed to sleep.
The details of this new study which has been published in Biology Letters, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, points out that sharks can sleep and many prefer keeping their eyes wide open while doing so.
Talking to Newsweek, Michael Kelly, an author of this study said: "Until now, sleep in sharks was completely unstudied and unknown. Sharks are a particularly important group as they are the oldest living jawed vertebrates—a trait they share with us.” Kelly is an ecophysiologist at La Trobe University, Melbourne.
The subject of this study was the draughtsboard sharks. This native to New Zealand nocturnal species was observed to be sleeping during periods of rest. This particular species which in contrast to the tiger sharks and the great whites, which need to swim constantly to keep water flowing to their gills, are buccal pumping shark species. This means that when stationary, they can push water manually over their gills to take in oxygen.
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