Question Answered.
On one of those Monday afternoons where law is strangulation and nagging questions about the nature of the universe become an urgent priority, a gnat was flying around my desk and I realized I didn’t know if insects got tired or if their life span was too short for any kind of exhaustion short of death. If there is too much shit to do, like procreate with urgency, you’re not gonna sleep right? What is the lifespan of a bumblebee anyway? So, I decided I must investigate this question. Being a lazy scientist, and well, not being a scientist at all, I emailed my brilliant friend Adam with the question. The following is his reply for all of you out there who have also been wondering, but haven’t bothered to look it up:
“To my eternal shame, I have no idea, but I found the following in the Guardian, in some sort of ‘Ask scientists!’ article:
Q: Do insects sleep?
A: Not in the way we think of it, no. We need lots of sleep to ‘recharge’ our brains (although no one yet knows how exactly this work). Most insects will rest to conserve energy rather then ‘recharge’ and so have ‘periods of inactivity’ (either at night or during the day depending on whether they are nocturnal or diurnal).
During that time, some of them may go into a kind of short-term hibernation where all their bodily functions are massively reduced. This is more like suspended animation than sleep as we understand it, though.”The answer to the question ‘do insects feel tired’, however, is almost certainly no, because I can say with a fair amount of confidence that insects don’t have the capacity to truly “feel” anything, which probably requires some sort of proto-self, at least. But really, who knows?”