Scientists Find Most Cats Sleep on Their Left Side – This Could Be Why
Cats are already known to prefer an elevated position when they nap, like the top of a cat tree, or somewhere in the stack of suitcases on your wardrobe, far out of reach from ground predators and cuddle-hungry owners.
This behavior allows them to see any threats coming from afar. The study's authors reasoned that cats' sleeping positions – whether they lie on their left or right side – may serve similar functions.
"Asymmetries in behavior can have advantages because both hemispheres of the brain specialize in different tasks," says behavioral neuroscientist Onur Güntürkün, from Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.
Related:
Güntürkün and his team analyzed the sleeping positions of cats in 408 carefully chosen YouTube videos, which revealed a statistically significant leftward bias. Two-thirds of the cats chose to lie on their left, a position that leaves their left visual field unobstructed by their own body.
The left visual field feeds into the right brain, which is associated with spatial awareness, threat identification, and the coordination of quick escape. So this sleeping position may grant the cat a quicker reaction time when woken by a predator (or needy human).
"Sleep is one of the most vulnerable states for an animal, as anti-predator vigilance is drastically reduced, especially in deep sleeping phases," the study's authors write.
"We are inclined to believe that the significant leftward bias in sleeping position in cats may have been evolutionarily driven by hemispheric asymmetries of threat processing, but additional factors cannot be excluded."
This research was published in Current Biology.
Orcas Caught 'Kissing' For Two Minutes With Tongue
Microbe 'Flavors' Tell Octopuses Which Babies Deserve Their Care
A Mysterious Blob of Cold Water Defies Ocean Heat – Now We Know Why
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Engadget
16 hours ago
- Engadget
YouTuber Mark Rober is bringing his experiments to Netflix
Mark Rober will bring his scientific talents to Netflix with two upcoming projects. Rober is a former NASA engineer who parlayed his skills into an entertaining and educational YouTube career. In past years, we've seen him develop not just one , but two stinky glitter bombs to fend off porch package thieves, as well as leading work on a Guinness World Record-holding robot called the Dominator . According to an announcement from Netflix, Rober "will bring some of his most beloved, ambitious, and informative experiments" to the streaming platform later this year. Then in 2026, he'll also host a competition series aimed at kids and family viewers. Rober's CrunchLabs business and Kimmelot, late night host Jimmy Kimmel's production company, will be producing.
The Verge
18 hours ago
- The Verge
YouTuber Mark Rober is getting a Netflix series
Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer now known for his science-focused stunts he publishes to more than 70 million subscribers on YouTube, will launch a competition show on Netflix in 2026. Rober will also bring 'some of his most beloved, ambitious, and informative experiments to Netflix later this year,' Netflix says. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Netflix had talked to Rober. According to that article, Netflix has also had discussions with the creators at Dude Perfect, a channel with more than 60 million YouTube subscribers, about a new series. And earlier this year, Netflix brought videos from Ms. Rachel, known for her videos for toddlers and early education, to its platform. The push from Netflix into bringing on YouTube creators follows the success of MrBeast's Beast Games game show on Prime Video. That show debuted last year and quickly became Prime Video's 'most-watched unscripted show ever.' It has been renewed for two more seasons. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Jay Peters Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Netflix Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Streaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All YouTube
Scientific American
21 hours ago
- Scientific American
Why This Seabird's Superpooper Lifestyle Is Amazing Scientists
When a scientist started fixing backward-facing cameras to the bellies of seabirds called Streaked Shearwaters in a breeding colony in Japan, he had pure intentions: he wanted to observe the birds' leg movements as they launched into flight from the water. And so he sat down with the video footage only to see—splat!—very little besides—splat!—poop. Leo Uesaka, a seabird biologist at the University of Tokyo, noticed that his cameras were recording an awful lot of midair pooping. It was time to change his research project. The results of his refocused analysis of 35 hours of footage from 15 birds, published on August 18 in the journal Current Biology, show several surprises. The Streaked Shearwaters (Calonectris leucomelas) were pooping every four to 10 minutes, an average of five times per hour, losing perhaps 5 percent of their body mass hourly. Each individual bird seemed to have a regular interval at which it pooped. And the birds almost exclusively pooped when flying, occasionally seeming to take off for that sole purpose. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. That's three strange findings from one simple innovation: turning the bird-mounted video camera around. 'Video loggers are always looking forward to share the bird's view,' Uesaka says. And if Uesaka didn't expect to see much from footage facing the other direction, he's in good company, other researchers say. In the study, Uesaka and his co-author 'have pointed out something that probably very few people ever even thought about,' says Hugh Ellis, a biologist at the University of San Diego, who studies seabirds but was not involved with the new research. 'Everybody's going to want to know whether their seabirds excrete only over water.' Although research on seabird pooping habits might sound silly, it's not just a matter of idle curiosity: there are important scientific questions at play. 'We know that seabirds have a huge influence on ecosystems via the prey that they consume,' says Ruth Dunn, a marine ecologist at Lancaster University in England, who studies seabirds and was not involved with Uesaka's study. 'But increasingly now, research groups are beginning to think about the influence of the other end, the guano that they're excreting.' (Guano is the scientific term for seabird poop—although it's not really poop per se because birds have a multipurpose hole called a cloaca for disposing of mixed waste products and package their urine into a goopier product that results in less water loss than mammals' urine. But you know what we mean.) It's not just seabirds either—in recent decades scientists have started recognizing that all animals produce waste that can, depending on their habits, move vital elements such as phosphorus and nitrogen throughout ecosystems. 'Of course, all animals excrete or defecate in some way,' says Joe Roman, a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont, who studies nutrient cycling and was not involved in the new research. 'Everything from the smallest insects to bison to wolves—all species can play a role in this movement of nutrients between systems.' If plants are the lungs of the planet, then this nutrient cycling is a sort of circulatory system—the question is what kind of scale it occurs on. 'They also can move nutrients when they die, but of course you only die once,' he says. 'For most animals, they're peeing and pooping every day.' Or, in the case of Streaked Shearwaters, they're doing so every few minutes. Uesaka and his co-author, Katsufumi Sato of the University of Tokyo, can't definitively explain why the birds poop so often or why they defecate from the air, although the researchers posit that excreting almost exclusively during flight could be a sort of hygiene measure. Unfortunately, that strategy would be hygienic only for the pooper. Uesaka says that the footage comes from foraging trips in which the shearwaters form large flocks, with some birds resting on the surface while others fly—and poop—overhead. He says it's important for scientists to know how much birds are pooping at sea, given that bird flu is decimating wildlife and can spread via feces. Ellis suspects that the stunning frequency Uesaka observed is unique to Streaked Shearwaters or their close relatives. He says the finding doesn't match with his experience, which recently has focused on gulls and terns. Uesaka has already gathered equivalent video footage for Black-tailed Gulls (Larus crassirostris), but he hasn't felt moved to start combing through it yet. The birds, it turns out, aren't very compelling videographers. 'Most of the time, they're just filming the ocean and their butt,' he says.
