Elephants need just two hours of sleep a day, study finds

Elephants in the wild sleep an average of just two hours a day, a study has found.

Scientists used Fitbits to monitor the sleeping patterns of two matriarch elephants in the Chobe National Park in Botswana to find out how much they sleep.

The team, including experts from the University of the Witwatersrand and colleagues from the NGO Elephants Without Borders and the University of California, Los Angeles, monitored when the elephants used their trunks using a Fitbit and a GPS collar to look at where and when they were lying down to sleep to work out how much sleep they got.

The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, found that the elephants slept only two hours a day on average – mostly in the early hours of the morning, before dawn.

Professor Paul Manger, from the School of Anatomical Sciences at Wits University, said the data also suggested that environmental conditions like temperature and humidity are related to when the elephants fell asleep and woke up.

“This finding is the first that indicates that sleep in wild animals is likely not to be related to sunrise and sunset, but that other environmental factors are more crucial to the timing of sleep,” he said.

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The team also found that the wild elephants could sleep while standing up or while lying down.

Lying down to sleep only happened every three or four days for about an hour – with those times likely to be when the elephants go into REM – or dreaming sleep – meaning they may only dream every few days rather than on a daily basis.

The experts also found that the two elephants, when disturbed by things like predators, poachers, or a bull elephant, could go without sleep for up to 48 hours, and would walk up to 30km from the disturbance – putting them out of reach of danger, but at the expense of a loss of a night’s sleep.

“Understanding how different animals sleep is important for two reasons,” Prof Manger said. “First, it helps us to understand the animals themselves and discover new information that may aid the development of better management and conservation strategies, and, second, knowing how different animals sleep and why they do so in their own particular way, helps us to understand how humans sleep, why we do, and how we might get a better night’s sleep.”