幼蜂剥夺了工蜂的睡眠时间

This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Karen Hopkin.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是凯伦·霍普金。

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that taking care of babies is a demanding business.

如果有一件事是我们都同意的，那就是照顾婴儿是一项要求很高的工作。

New parents are always on duty, and late-night feedings and fussing leave caregivers chronically sleep-deprived.

初为父母的人总是无法休息，深夜喂奶和忙乱让照顾者长期睡眠不足。

Turns out the issue is not unique to humans, because the same thing happens to bees.

事实证明，这个问题并不只存在于人类身上，因为同样的事情也发生在蜜蜂身上。

Researchers found that worker bees who care for the brood get less sleep than their sisters, because bee babies produce chemicals that keep their caretakers awake.

研究人员发现，照顾幼蜂的工蜂比它们的姐妹们睡得少，因为蜜蜂宝宝会产生化学物质，让照顾它们的工蜂保持清醒。

The findings appear in the journal Current Biology.

这项研究结果发表在《当代生物学》杂志上。

It seems that all animals sleep, including the birds and the bees.

似乎所有的动物都要睡觉，包括鸟和蜜蜂。

Yet this daily phenomenon still remains blanketed in mystery.

然而，这种日常现象仍然笼罩在神秘之中。

“The exact function of sleep is still an enigma, but we know that reduced or sleep loss is associated with reduced performance, health and survival.”

“睡眠的确切功能仍然是个谜，但我们知道睡眠减少或睡眠缺失与表现、健康和生存能力下降有关。”

Moshe Nagari was a postdoc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when he started studying sleep.

摩西·纳加里开始研究睡眠时是耶路撒冷希伯来大学的博士后。

In particular, he was curious about how animals can sometimes sacrifice shut-eye when they’ve got important work to do—especially moms tending to their young.

他特别好奇的是，当动物们有重要的工作要做时，它们有时会牺牲睡眠时间——尤其是妈妈们要照顾它们的孩子时。

“Killer whale mothers, for example, follow their cubs for the first few weeks postpartum and hardly ever sleep in this time for several weeks.”

“例如，虎鲸妈妈会在产后的头几周跟踪它们的幼崽，在这段时间里，它们几乎没有睡过。”

Rather than swimming along with killer whales for a couple of months, Nagari focused his attention on bumblebees.

纳加里没有选择和虎鲸一起游几个月泳，而是把注意力集中在大黄蜂上。

In these colonies, a queen lays the eggs, and worker bees called nurses care for the resulting hatchlings.

在这些蜂群中，蜂王产卵，被称为看护的工蜂负责照料孵化出来的幼蜂。

To start, Nagari confirmed that when nurses were housed with larvae, they slept significantly less than bees who didn’t have babies to attend to.

首先，纳加里证实，当工蜂和幼蜂住在一起时，它们的睡眠明显少于那些没有孩子需要照顾的蜜蜂。

“So our first intuition was that the larvae are constantly signaling to the nurse bees that they are hungry, and this signaling is what’s keeping the nurse bees awake.”

“所以我们的第一直觉是，幼蜂不断地向看护蜜蜂发出饿了的信号，而这种信号是让看护蜜蜂保持清醒的原因。”

So the researchers replaced the larvae with pupae, a developmental stage that doesn’t require constant feeding.

因此，研究人员用蛹代替了幼蜂，蛹是一种不需要持续进食的发育阶段。

“And to our surprise, we found that nurse bees with pupae slept even less than the bees that were housed with feeding larvae.”

“令我们惊讶的是，我们发现看护蛹的蜜蜂甚至比看护幼蜂的蜜蜂睡得更少。”

These babies, it seemed, needed the bee equivalent of swaddling.

这些蛹似乎需要蜜蜂襁褓。

“Indeed, in our observations, we saw that the nurses were incubating the pupae at the expense of sleep.”

“事实上，在我们的观察中，我们看到看护蜜蜂在以睡眠为代价孵化蛹。”

What’s more, the babies didn’t even have to be there.

更重要的是，这些蛹甚至不必在那里。

It seems that simply surrounding the nurses with the cocoons in which the pupae had been resting was enough to keep the caregivers awake and on their toes

看来，仅仅用蛹休息的茧包围看护蜜蜂就足以让它们保持清醒、保持警觉，

—which suggests that baby bees secrete a chemical that does the work of a late-night cup of coffee.

这表明幼蜂分泌一种化学物质，起到深夜一杯咖啡的作用。

“If this interpretation is true, this is the first evidence that pheromones from juveniles can modulate the sleep of caregiver adults in any animal....”

“如果这一解释是正确的，这是第一个证据，表明任何动物中，来自幼崽的信息素可以调节成年看护者的睡眠....”

Keeping adult bees from getting their z’s.

让成年蜜蜂睡不着觉。

Thanks for listening for Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.

谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是凯伦·霍普金。