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Animals Through the Night: Sleepover at the Zoo

In a never-before-attempted experiment at Bristol Zoo, Liz Bonnin and a team of experts stay up all night to track the diverse sleep patterns of animals from lions to meerkats.

In a never-before-attempted sleep experiment, Bristol Zoo has been rigged with cameras and sensors and Liz Bonnin and sleep expert Bryson Voirin stay up all night to see what the animals get up to when they think no-one is watching. From red pandas and lions to meerkats and tapirs, for the first time a whole range of animal sleep behaviours is compared and contrasted across the course of a single night.

The programme delves into the extraordinary world of animal sleep, looking at not only what science has already discovered, but the questions which remain to be answered. From dolphins, which have come up with ingenious solutions to allow them to sleep while swimming, through to ants that have developed complex behavioural patterns which ensure that the colony sleeps undisturbed, to meerkats, who keep an ear open for danger during sleep, and flamingos, which arrange themselves in order to keep a wary eye out for night-time predators.

1 hour, 30 minutes

Last on

Fri 19 May 2017 01:15

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Credits

Role Contributor
Presenter Liz Bonnin
Presenter Bryson Voirin
Director Nicholas Head
Executive Producer Owen Gay
Executive Producer Laura Marshall
Executive Producer Marcus Herbert
Executive Producer Tom McDonald
Participant John Partridge
Participant Russell Foster
Participant Nigel Franks
Participant Lynsey Bugg
Participant Ulf Schonfeld
Participant Jochen Reiter
Participant Jessie Croone
Participant Niels Rattenborg
Participant Peter Evans
Participant Vicky Jones
Participant Paul Cook
Participant Paul Strachan

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