#primate

#primate

Why Do Humans Sleep Less than Other Primates?Adult humans average about seven hours of sleep per day. By contrast, chimpanzee, one of our closest relatives, sleep 9.5 hours a day, and other primates sleep even longer. Why is that? Common sense might tell you that it's because of television, the internet, stress, artificial schedules, and lights. But studies show that non-industrial communities, even those without electricity, sleep about the same amount. There's something about being human that causes us to get less sleep than other primates. Some new studies give us a hypothesis and some caveats. It's possible that we evolved to operate on less sleep when we stopped living in trees. Animals that sleep on the ground are at a higher risk from predators, so our ancestors began sleeping in groups with someone keeping watch in shifts. That would also explain why humans have more flexible sleep patterns than other primates. The caveat is that we might not know as much about animal sleep patterns as we think we do. Some studies show that creatures who live in zoos and laboratories sleep more than those in the wild, although studies of how long wild animals sleep in their own environment are rather scarce. Read a lot more about the research into why humans sleep less than other primates at Smithsonian.(Image credit: Daniel Ramirez)#sleep #primate #evolution #naturalselection

Image Competition Winners Show the Diversity of Ecological ScienceThe image above by Kristen Brown shows a school of jackfish swimming in a spiral at the Great Barrier Reef. It was the overall winner in the 2021 photo competition from the scientific journal BMC Ecology and Evolution. The picture also won in the category Conservation Biology. The competition attracted entries from researchers all around the world eager to use their creativity to highlight their work and capture the diversity of the planet's flora and fauna. BMC Ecology and Evolution invited anyone affiliated with a research institution to submit to one of the following six categories: ‘Conservation Biology', 'Evolutionary Developmental Biology and Biodiversity', 'Behavioural Ecology', 'Human Evolution and Ecology', ‘Population Ecology' and 'Ecological Developmental Biology'.Our Senior Editorial Board Members lent their expertise to judge the entrants to the competition, selecting the overall winner, runner up and best image from each category. The board members considered the scientific story behind the photos submitted in addition to their artistic judgement (Fig. 1).#jackfish #fish #biology #photography #photocompetition