Emerging evidence suggests that basically everything has a "sleep-like" state (lowered activity, periodic, homeostatically regulated, increased arousal threshold, necessary for good health).
In most things with good experimental models for learning and memory, this sleep-like state supports formation of long term memories, e.g. [0] in nematode worms and [1] in honeybees.
So really the rate limiting step is the discovery of how to interrogate/characterize behavior, learning and memory in weird little critters that don't sense or behave like mammals.
Of course there is also the philosophical question re: qualia of memory-reconsolidation-associated processes in sleep and whether they feels the same to a human or nematode - Probably not, as everything else probably feels pretty different to them too! But from a behavioralist perspective they're pretty much the same modulo the behavioral range of a human or a worm.
In most things with good experimental models for learning and memory, this sleep-like state supports formation of long term memories, e.g. [0] in nematode worms and [1] in honeybees.
So really the rate limiting step is the discovery of how to interrogate/characterize behavior, learning and memory in weird little critters that don't sense or behave like mammals.
Of course there is also the philosophical question re: qualia of memory-reconsolidation-associated processes in sleep and whether they feels the same to a human or nematode - Probably not, as everything else probably feels pretty different to them too! But from a behavioralist perspective they're pretty much the same modulo the behavioral range of a human or a worm.
[0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.24.395228v2.... [1] https://jeb.biologists.org/content/215/22/3981