Dear Iguana-people;
Just in case you hear the query, "well, what do iguanas actually 'do' for us?" ...
And I've only posted the bit relevent to your green babies ... you can pick up the rest of the item at the URL below if desired.
respects, Wes
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JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION (Atlanta, Georgia) 08 November 05 Looking to other creatures to explain our need for sleep (The New York Times) {Excerpt}
In a laboratory at Indiana State University, a dozen green iguanas sprawl tranquilly in terrariums. They while away the hours basking under their heat lamps, and at night they close both eyes — or sometimes just one. They lead comfortable lives pretty much indistinguishable from any ordinary pet iguana, except for one notable exception: the bundles of brain-wave recording wires that trail from their heads.
A team of scientists at Indiana State would like to know what happens in the brains of the iguanas when the lights go out. Do they sleep as we do? Do they shut their whole brains down, for example, or can they keep one half awake?
These scientists in Terre Haute hope the iguanas will also help shed some light on an even more fundamental question: why sleep even exists.
"Sleep has attracted a tremendous amount of attention in science, but we really don't know what sleep is," said Steven Lima, a biologist at Indiana State.
Lima belongs to a small but growing group of scientists who are pushing sleep research deep into the animal kingdom. They suspect that most animal species need to sleep, suggesting that human slumber has an evolutionary history reaching back over half a billion years.
Today animals sleep in many different ways: brown bats for 20 hours a day, for example, and giraffes for less than two. To understand why people sleep the way they do, scientists need an explanation powerful enough to encompass the millions of other species that sleep as well.
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Looking to other creatures to explain our need for sleep
