Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Good night, Sloth

Scientist Niels Rattenborg of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, did an study with sluggish bears. He took some of this animals from their trees, so he could put a mini battery recorder for sloths in a lab.
The device allows monitoring of electrical impulses from the brain, but instead of keeping the animals in the lab, they put them outside, to know more about their lives.
What happened was that they sticked them in their hairs, and 3 days later they took the devices away and check all the results.
“I think this is the first to really do sleep in free-roaming animals — that’s what makes the paper interesting,” says evolutionary neuroscientist Paul Manger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The approach holds promise since miniaturization and data retrieval technologies are improving so rapidly, he adds.
This is something that is really interesting, because you can check animals in a lab and know results about them, but when they are in their natural environment things change, so you can actually know how animals act when there are predators near to them.
Even though this helps, animals can feel different when they have something stick in their heads, but the study says that at first the sloths were stressed out because of the device but later they went back to normal and that they didn't sleep a lot, they just sleep 20% of the day, and that is what humans normally sleep.
One interesting thing that was found out with this study, was that while this animals were sleeping it seemed like they were chewing something, so maybe they were dreaming about eating leaves.

From this article I have different opinions.
First I think that for understanding the behavior of animals it's something good to do, because we will have more information about the way they act with other animals of their kind and to see how similar or different their behavior can be with other animals and even humans.
But another opinion that I have is not that good, because I think that animals can feel different when they have something stick in their heads, because they are not used to it so it's not normal to them, their mood can change, they can act weird or rare because of the device, it might seem like it doesn't affect them, but they don't know what is going on, and maybe this particular device don't hurt them but later they can be some that would damage them and I don't think this is a good thing to do , because you are interfering with their natural way of living, and animals have feellings too.

Marcela Murillo Trujano

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