Project Hail Mary and the science of… surviving sleep?
By Noah Heywood
“I sleep … You watch question?”
You just read one of the most famous lines of dialogue from the biggest space blockbuster of the year. When Rocky, a five-legged extraterrestrial and heart of the recently adapted novel Project Hail Mary, needed rest, audiences became momentarily lost in the quirkiness of such a request. But was this piece of comic relief also another of Andy Weir’s beautifully crafted tributes to the genuine science out in the real world? Luckily for us, it is.
As Rocky prepares to sleep after first meeting his new companion (a reluctant schoolteacher turned astronaut played by Ryan Gosling), he reiterates, “Eridian culture rule. Must watch.” In addition to being a brilliant showing of the cultural cooperation and mutual love the two characters show for one another throughout the story, this also touches on an evolutionary point often forgotten in our human-centred existence. Described as ‘sentinel behaviour’ by behavioural ecologists, animals commonly look out for one another in intermittent stints when sleeping and foraging in a large group – sleeping poses a huge risk of sudden attacks on animals of many shapes, sizes and sleeping habits, especially birds and small mammals. Deeper within this fascinating pattern of animal behaviour lies clues as to why some species have emerged successfully from millions of years of natural selection.
Hopefully, Eridian culture has evolved this particular sleeping practice out of altruism, rather than self-preservation
A commonly researched sentinel is the pied babbler, a bird species native to the southern countries of Africa. According to decades of research, this territorial species exhibits sentinel behaviour when in large enough groups by one individual keeping watch while members of the rest of the group forage for food on the ground below. Initial theories for the reason for this behaviour included selfishness and self-preservation, where, once energetic enough, a bird will watch out for predators as this gives it the best chance to escape once predators arrive. Research from Macquarie and Cape Town Universities subsequently disproved this theory, showing that in these birds, the sentinel individual is under far more threat than the rest of the group, as looking for threats makes them themselves conspicuous, and less close to cover. Pied babblers do it for the common good of the group. On the other hand, investigations into meerkats, which live in the savannah with the pied babbler, demonstrate greater rates of survival for the sentinel meerkat than others. This still increases survival for the group overall, where keeping watch while the group sleeps is especially vital for mobs with young pups who need extra sleep time in the day.
The upshot? It’s hard to say what the causes of Rocky’s peculiar sleeping habits are, as the benefits of keeping lookout vary wildly by species. Hopefully, Eridian culture has evolved this particular sleeping practice out of altruism, rather than self-preservation – a perfect metaphor in a story of reluctant astronaut packaged up and blasted out into space as the last hope for a desperate world.
Image: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI) via Wikimedia Commons
