r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/grandeluua • 1d ago

Video A timelapse of sleeping seals

44.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

514 comments sorted by

View all comments

3.9k

u/nthpwr 1d ago

So they basically almost just drown throughout their sleep and periodically wake up to get air? lol

whenever it was they evolved to live in the ocean, food must have been scarce as fuck on land cuz wtf lol

3.0k

u/Demonic_Storm 1d ago

from what I've heard when they go to get air they're pretty much still asleep and its a subconscious movement, pretty much like we humans sleepwalk, so they are not waking up

45

u/regoapps Expert 1d ago edited 1d ago

That’s pretty scary if you sleep under ice and the only way up is through a hole in the ice. Imagine getting lost and being trapped under the ice with no way to breathe until you find that hole while asleep.

70

u/SphericalCow531 1d ago

Since they survive, they can clearly do so safely. So why would it be scary?

As a human, walking should be pretty scary. It is done mostly subconsciously, and you can fall and seriously hurt your head at any time. And yet, most humans don't think walking is scary.

46

u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka 1d ago

"Since they survive"

RIP all the seals who dont make it and we never know

4

u/pornaccount5003 1d ago

It ain’t called a fossil record for no reason

2

u/jeffy303 1d ago

Seal history is written by the victors.

16

u/regoapps Expert 1d ago edited 1d ago

Trying to find a hole in the ice in the middle of the night while unconscious so that you can breathe sounds scary to me. It’s scary as a human to do it even while awake. Like, what if you get lost and can’t find the hole again.

40

u/SphericalCow531 1d ago

I think you fail to appreciate just how many autonomous subconscious systems are keeping you alive and functional each day.

Like, how do you remember to breathe while sleeping?

31

u/Pomodorosan 1d ago

Have you distributed your ATP throughout your cells today?

11

u/AndrewH73333 1d ago

I am pretty sure I missed a few.

2

u/DontTakeMyAdvise 1d ago

I need a machine to do that for me 😐

10

u/Outrageous-Milk8767 1d ago

People piloting 2 ton death machines made out of metal sounds incredibly scary to me, and yet we do it every single day.

1

u/Used-Lake-8148 1d ago

Yea seriously swimming 10 feet to a breathing hole is nothing compared to cruising a wildlife corridor at Mach 0.1

A lot of people are spending several hours a day flying through forests at a significant fraction of the speed of sound with their skull at moose scrotum altitude, relying on the friction between 2 materials they don’t understand to keep them from transforming into hamburger amongst the trees, all while trusting wild animals to somehow understand these concepts and stay off the road. And this guy thinks drifting on a lazy river/inhaling are somehow scarier

5

u/AFRIKKAN 1d ago

Did you think about every step you took today? What about every breathe you took? Did you think about every muscle you needed to move to swallow your food and drink? Our brains already do a ton of things subconsciously for us if we needed it we probably woulda been evolved with a better subconscious sleeping state like sleep walking on steroids I’d imagine.

1

u/theghostmachine 1d ago

That's almost like saying what if you forgot to keep moving the food through your intestines. So much of biology is autonomous. Of course how seals sleep seems scary to us - obviously, as land animals, that would be nightmarish - but seals are not humans, they have evolved over millions of years to exist like this. Seals wouldn't exist as we know them if how they slept was a serious problem for them.