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Like any other animal, Drosophila sleeps. But some individual flies hardly rest at all, according to a study published yesterday (February 20) in Science Advances. And results from a sleep deprivation experiment show that, in contrast to the devastating effects seen among other animals when they are kept awake, fruit flies handle it pretty well.
“[W]e report two surprising findings . . . challenging the notion that sleep is a vital necessity: the discovery of virtually sleepless flies and the finding that chronic sleep restriction in Drosophila melanogaster has notably less pronounced effects on longevity than previously thought,” the authors write in their paper.
For one part of the project, the researchers videotaped fruit flies behaving in the lab for four days and had a machine-learning program calculate the time the flies were moving or were still, presumably asleep. Typically, the flies slept several hours, but ...
