Have you ever felt the need to do nothing? Do you find pleasure in spending hours and hours on the couch in your living room without doing anything? Do you feel guilty about this situation? Do not do it anymore because new scientific research has discovered that being lazy is a better way to prolong your life!
A research team based at the University of Kansas has published the results of a large-scale study that proves that laziness could be a successful strategy for the survival of individuals, species and even species communities.
All about research!
Research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provides an extremely interesting link between the metabolic rates of various species and their probability of extinction. In the end, being an energetic species is now a way to die early. Scientists have found that species with a higher metabolic rate are more prone to extinction than those that are a little more lazy.
Luke Strotz, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Biodiversity and the Museum of Natural History at the University of Kansas, and his team questioned whether it is possible to examine the probability of extinction of a species based on the absorption of energy by his body?
Scientists have collected a wealth of data on nearly 300 different species that have lived from five million years to the present day. They then traced the metabolic needs of the different species, which is a way to assess how active the animals were to continue to live.
Experts concluded that species with lower energy maintenance requirements appear to be more likely to survive than those with higher metabolic rate. They also hope that they will be able to apply this research to the study of other endangered species in the hope of maintaining their longevity and improving the accuracy of the determination of the probability of their extinction.
In conclusion, the experts add that they will have to examine the link between metabolism and extinction in other groups of animals to better understand the theory.
Science continues to search
This is an interesting discovery, but this is obviously not the case for all species. Another study by Dr. Ceri Shipton of the Australian National University found that a particularly lazy group of ancient human ancestors had a strategy called the "least effort" and caused its death. The best example of this population's strategy is that individuals refused to explore new places with water sources as the climate became increasingly drier. Their laziness and lack of motivation therefore caused these individuals to run out of water and eventually perish.
Providing effort could therefore be expensive or not for a well-defined species. While waiting for science to decide on this subject, let's enjoy life as everyone sees fit!
