Collective Dynamics of Sleep

Introduction

Sleep is a biological imperative for all animals: insufficient sleep can have detrimental effects on individuals’ health, cognition, social functioning, and overall fitness. Even among gregarious species, sleep has largely been studied in lone individuals in laboratory settings, divorced from relevant socio-ecological context. This limitation restricts our ability to understand how social environments shape, and are shaped by, the sleep patterns of their members.

Project Goals

My goal is to bring the study of sleep into the collective context. Specifically, I aim to:

1. Understand how social processes structure the sleep patterns of individuals, groups, and populations.
2. Test how gregarious animals navigate the opportunities and constraints imposed by sleeping as part of a group.

Methodology

To achieve these goals, I will integrate cutting-edge technologies with traditional field-observation methods to measure and model the collective dynamics of sleep among wild baboons. The methodology includes:

• Continuous monitoring of movement, position, and sleep of baboons at the individual, group, and population levels using GPS and accelerometry tracking of members of 30 troops of wild baboons.
• 3-D laser scanning of the physical sleep environment.
• Overnight thermal videography.
• Sleep-disruption field experiments.
• Focal sampling of social behaviors.
• Advanced computational modeling.

Expected Outcomes

This ground-breaking project will be the first to measure the collective sleep behavior of animal groups in a socially and ecologically relevant context. As such, it has the potential to shed wholly new light on social and ecological trade-offs that gregarious species – like our own – must balance to satisfy the biological imperative of sleep.