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Liz Bonnin

Bryson Voirin

Nicholas Head

Owen Gay

Laura Marshall

Marcus Herbert

Tom McDonald

John Partridge

Russell Foster

Nigel Franks

Lynsey Bugg

Ulf Schonfeld

Jochen Reiter

Jessie Croone

Niels Rattenborg

Peter Evans

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Paul Cook

Paul Strachan

Animals Through the Night: Sleepover at the Zoo

Documentaries

Factual: Pets & Animals

Factual: Science & Nature: Nature & Environment

03/03/2014

BBC Four - Animals Through the Night: Sleepover at the Zoo

A team of experts stays up all night to track the sleep patterns of a host of animals.

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.

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