Even Jellyfish Sleep
Three Caltech students have shown that these brainless animals have their own version of slumber.
When Ravi Nath asks people if jellyfish sleep, he finds that everyone thinks they know the answer. Roughly half say yes, and half say no. Some scientists assert that only mammals and birds could be said to truly sleep. Other people think that even plants have something akin to sleep. “Every person we’ve asked has an opinion,” Nath says. “Even a 10-year-old kid has a response.”
. Along with his friends and fellow California Institute of Technology students and , he put a jellyfish called through a gauntlet of clever experiments, which confirmed that they do indeed enter a sleeplike state. Every night, they become less active and less responsive. They can be easily roused from this state, but if they’re deprived of their slow periods for too
