All species of swallows – like the common swallow (Apus Apus), the pale swallow (Apus Pallidus) or the Indian swallow (Apus Affinis) – are migratory birds and perennial flyers: they manage to perform all the main vital activities in flight, even sleep At high altitude using only a brain hemisphere. They are very rarely laid, mainly to nest.
Sleep in flight of the common Rondone
The Rondone, like other migratory birds, succeeds in sleep in flight while maintaining a certain control of the surrounding environment, thanks to a particular type of sleep said “Unienemisferic sleep“. In this mode, a cerebral hemisphere remains active and one restssimultaneously closes the opposite eye to the dormant hemisphere, while the other eye remains open. It is appropriate to say that The Rondone “sleeps with one eye”. It seems that the type of sleep compatible with the flight is the slow wave sleep (SWS) because it can be obtained on one or both cerebral hemispheres, while the so -called REM sleep occurs only on a sinister level. Night rest in flight is generally in high altitude And it is characterized by long plate intervals. It is preceded by a vertical climb during the twilight at altitude up to 2.5 km of altitude where The risk of predators or collisions is reduced.
The common swallow flies also for 10 consecutive months
The common swallow (Apus Apus) is one of the 113 species of the Apodidi family, migratory birds with a high anatomical, physiological and behavioral specialization on the fly. Everything is calibrated to keep constantly in the air, but with the minimum muscle effort. The swallows remain in flight too For 10 months during their non -reproductive period And during their migration to and from the Africa sub – Saharan. This attitude had already been hypothesized by Abbot Lazzaro Spallanzani at the end of the 1700s of the last century and was confirmed experimentally thanks to a study conducted between 2014 and 2015 by a team of zoologists from the University of Lund in Sweden. The researchers equipped a sample with swallows with a micro-team (a micro-state and an accelerometer) for record time and flight activity. In some individuals some landing was detected, but the duration of the stops was short and never longer than 2 hours. The swallows, therefore, rest, mate, feed on insects always flying. A particular technique is also adopted for drinking: they drop towards a mirror of water with a mechanism of planata Up to touch the surface of the water in speed and then trace immediately, limiting the muscle effort to the maximum.
