Delays, debt and distress
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SPIDERS DREAM
Anyone who has watched a sleeping dog “chasing rabbits” will be familiar with the characteristic twitching that occurs during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Sleep, or a sleep-like state, occurs across many different animal taxa, including arthropods and perhaps even cnidarians, but we do not know whether invertebrates have the capacity to dream. Rößler et al. noticed REM-like muscle twitching during what appeared to be sleep in a jumping spider. Further, although spiders cannot move their eyes, they can move their retinas. The authors showed that the muscular twitching movements were associated with retinal eye movements in these spiders, as would be expected in REM sleep, indicating that this sleep stage may be widely distributed among animals.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 119, e2204754119 (2022).
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SILAS MARNER
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