研究发现，即使在连续数月甚至一年的完全黑暗环境中，小龙虾和马蹄蟹仍能维持其生物钟的日常节律，调整其视觉系统以适应白天和夜晚。这种内部计时机制被称为昼夜节律，其周期大约为一天，但并非精确24小时，个体间存在差异，从22.2到25.5小时不等，并且能够长时间保持稳定。然而，动物们需要如日出这样的外部信号来维持一个精确的24小时周期，这些信号不仅使动物的日常节律与当地太阳日的特定特征相协调，而且似乎将内部时钟的周期保持接近地球自转的周期。
1
When crayfish are kept continuously in the dark, even for four to five months, their compound eyes continue to adjust on a daily schedule for daytime and nighttime vision. Horseshoe crabs kept in the dark continuously for a year were found to maintain a persistent rhythm of brain activity that similarly adapts their eyes on a daily schedule for bright or for weak light.
Like almost all daily cycles of animals deprived of environmental cues, those measured for the horseshoe crabs in these conditions were not exactly 24 hours. Such a rhythm whose period is approximately-but not exactly-a day is called circadian. (这里下了一个定义，之后是例子) // For different individual horseshoe crabs, the circadian period ranged from 22.2 to 25.5 hours. A particular animal typically maintains its own characteristic cycle duration with great precision for many days.
2
Animals need natural periodic signals like sunrise to maintain a cycle whose period is precisely 24 hours. Such an external cue not only coordinates an animal's daily rhythms with particular features of the local solar day but also-because it normally does so day after day-seems to keep the internal clock's period close to that of Earth's rotation. Because the internal signals that regulate waking and going to sleep tend to align themselves with these external cues, the external clock appears to dominate the internal clock. Yet despite this synchronization of the period of the internal cycle, the animal's timer itself continues to have its own genetically built-in period close to, but different from, 24 hours. Without the external cue, the difference accumulates and so the internally regulated activities of the biological day drift continuously, like the tides, in relation to the solar day.
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