Comment by hearsathought
4 days ago
> If you need oxygen, then you need sleep!
Do plants sleep? Don't some insects, like flies, live without any sleep?
4 days ago
> If you need oxygen, then you need sleep!
Do plants sleep? Don't some insects, like flies, live without any sleep?
Insects do sleep, the paper we're discussing is a study of flies.
I think it should have been “If you need oxygen and have a CNS, then you need sleep.” Other tissues can take oxidative break during wakefulness, but since CNS is _generating_ wakefulness, if it takes a break, by construction there is sleep.
Plants breathe out oxygen, like we breathe out the other one.
That's true for photosynthesis but don't they still have oxygen respiration (i.e. oxidizing sugar for energy?)
They need oxygen for the mitochondrial electron transport chain to produce ATP. The vast majority of multicellular organisms need oxygen for that reason, and I can count the exceptions on one or two hands (i.e. Pogonophoran tube worms, some anaerobic sponges, a few parasitic helminths).
yes, at night they breath oxygen. Maybe they sleep during the day.
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Plants have chloroplasts that produce oxygen and sugar. But plants also have mitochondria that consume oxygen and sugar and run many of the same metabolic functions as in animals.
No, plants don't sleep, and neither do fungi or single celled organisms. Sleep seems to be a property specifically of animals.
Some plants do change to a "night" configuration though (closing leaves or petals, etc). Not sure if you could call it sleep.
I would be surprised by any organism that can sense its environment and doesn’t change behaviour at night. The difference is pretty extreme, whether its temperature, light or just all other beings changing what they’re doing. Even if you don’t notice yourself, you’ll probably be affected by second-order effects.
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Maybe plants are "always asleep" ?
And pray they never wake
By which criteria? They do respond to daily cycles. How do you know they do not sleep?
> Across the animal kingdom sleep satisfies most, though not necessarily all, of the following criteria: (1) decreased brain arousal and its behavioral correlate, decreased responsiveness to an animal’s surroundings, which distinguishes sleep from immobile wakefulness (also known as rest); (2) electrical changes in the brain’s activity patterns relative to the waking state; (3) behavioral quiescence, often accompanied by a preferred location and characteristic posture; (4) rapid reversibility, which distinguishes sleep from hibernation, anesthesia and coma; (5) homeostatic regulation, in which lost episodes of behavioral quiescence and low arousal are followed by compensatory (rebound) episodes [10].
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5120870/
4 and 5 don't seem to be exemplified by plants.
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