By: Jackson Liu

Northern elephant seals are great sleepers. The elephant seals swim at sea for months between some very short breaks on land. The seals spend most of the year in the Atlantic Ocean where they eat fish, small squids, and other animals. But, the seals also have many predators, like sharks and killer whales. Researchers shared discovery in the April 21 article titled “science” that during their journeys, seals sleep multiple times a day, each time for less than 20 minutes. “It’s important to map these extremes of [sleep behavior] across the animal kingdom,” says Jessica Kendall-Bar, who studies marine mammals at the University of California, San Diego. Learning the amount of sleep different animals get could help reveal why animals sleep. Knowing how seals sleep could also help scientists protect the places where seals sleep.