Summary: A recent study argues that team life has a significant impact on how animals sleep, with behaviors like timed REM sleeping in mice and rest suppression in bumblebees. Lacking the cultural context of wild rest, the majority of sleep studies focus on specific animals in laboratory settings.
The experts propose studying party sleeping using new technology, like sensor, to explore the connections between social behaviors and sleep. This method might provide new insights into the ecological and evolutionary facets of sleeping in group-living organisms.
Important Information:
- Group sleeping influences sleep patterns, schedule, and detail in some species.
- Most sleep research emphasis on persons, missing the cultural context of sleep.
- Studying team sleep in the wild was reveal sleep’s biological functions.
Origin: Cell Press
Sleeping in groups can have an impact on when pets sleep, how much they sleep for, and how seriously they sleep. For example, parties of lemurs time their sleep according to” sleep practices”, olive baboons sleep less when their party size increases, bumblebees reduce sleep in the presence of sons, and co-sleeping mice can experience synchronized REM sleep.
To , thoroughly comprehend both rest and pet social institutions, we need to pay more attention to the” social part” of slumber, animal theorists argue in an opinion paper publishing September 5 in the Cell Press journal , Trends in Ecology &, Evolution.  ,
Although many animals sleep in groups, the majority of sleep studies are conducted under laboratory conditions that only take into account one animal at a time. These high-resolution sleep study techniques can provide high-resolution data on sleep phase and depth, but they fail to account for the social or environmental contexts where sleep is typically experienced.
The researchers claim that we need to study groups of sleeping animals in the wild to understand the connections between sociality and sleeping.
The Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz, Germany’s Pritish Chakravarty and Margaret Crofoot, two behavioral ecologists, say that social sleep is a research frontier that” we believe has exciting potential for new insights into both sleep science and wild animals ‘ lives.”
We “propose a new framework to investigate how the social environment influences ( and is shaped by ) sleep by utilizing the simultaneous monitoring of the sleep of members of social groups, combined with time-series and social network analyses.
The researchers advise using technologies like wearable or implantable accelerometers to study sleep in the wild, which combine video or direct observations of animal behavior with information on animal movements.
According to the researchers, combining this sleep data with measurements of the group’s social networks, such as dominance hierarchies and kinship relationships, could provide important ecological and evolutionary insights into the effects of sleep on the fitness and survival of both individual and group animals.
” It is likely that key aspects of group behavior, including coordination, decision-making, and cooperative potential, will be influenced by the sleep of its members”, they write.
We can begin unraveling the adaptive functions and evolutionary trade-offs of sleep that may not be found by studying individual animals alone by gathering data on sleep and sociality and using our proposed tools to analyze social sleep.
Funding: This research was supported by the Max Planck Society, the Packard Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the European Union, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ( German Research Foundation ), the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship.
About this news from the study of social and sleep neuroscience.
Author: Kristopher Benke
Source: Cell Press
Contact: Kristopher Benke – Cell Press
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: The findings will be published in Trends in Ecology &, Evolution
