From:
Pam Sessoms
Date: 2001-10-29 06:23:00 UTC
Subject: Re: [Ferret-Health-list] shivering fert and dreaming fert!
Yeah, the shivering is normal... My little girl ferrets shiver more than
my big fat boy ferrets... I may have read somewhere that they cool down
when they sleep, and then they shiver to get back up to temp when they
wake up.
On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Michael Kowal wrote:
> My female also makes a lot of noise when she sleeps.
> I just figure that she's dreaming. Do ferrets dream?
Hee hee! YES, in fact, they dream quite a lot! I love holding a sleeping
ferret and witnessing all those little noises and twitches. It is even of
interest to people who research sleep. There was a study where some
researchers hooked two male ferrets up to some gadgets and found that
these two ferrets spent 40% of their sleep time in REM (rapid eye
movement, correlates with dreaming) periods. For cats it is a little over
13%. They also found that the high ferret REM figure was more due to lots
and lots of short REM periods rather than especially long ones. If anyone
is really curious, a citation to that article is below...
Cheers,
-Pam S.
Article title : A preliminary study of sleep in the ferret, Mustela
putorius furo: A carnivore with an extremely high proportion of REM sleep.
Authors: Marks, Gerald A; Shaffery, James P
Journal : Sleep. 1996 Feb; Vol 19(2): 83-93.