Group sleeping can influence the timing, duration, and quality of sleep in animals. For instance, meerkats often follow specific “sleep traditions” in their groups, olive baboons tend to sleep less as their group grows, bumblebees reduce their sleep when around their young, and mice that sleep together may synchronize their REM sleep. To gain a deeper understanding of sleep and social behaviors in animals, researchers stress the importance of examining the ‘social aspect’ of sleep as discussed in an opinion piece published on September 5 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
While many animals sleep in groups, most research on sleep is carried out in laboratory settings where individual animals are studied in isolation. Although these controlled studies yield detailed information about sleep phases and depth, they fail to capture the environmental and social contexts that typically surround sleep. Researchers argue that to comprehend the connections between sleep and socialization, it is essential to observe groups of sleeping animals in their natural habitats.
“Social sleep is a frontier of research that could lead to exciting new perspectives in both sleep science and the lives of wild animals,” state the researchers, including behavioral scientists Pritish Chakravarty and Margaret Crofoot from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz in Germany. “We propose a novel research framework that utilizes simultaneous monitoring of the sleep patterns of social group members alongside time-series and social network analyses to explore how social environments influence and are influenced by sleep.”
To investigate sleep behaviors in the wild, the researchers suggest using technologies like wearable or implantable accelerometers, which track animal movements in conjunction with video or direct observation of their behavior. Integrating sleep data with information about social network dynamics—such as dominance hierarchies and kinship—could yield important insights into how sleep affects the fitness and survival of individual animals as well as groups.
“It is probable that critical aspects of group dynamics, including coordination, decision-making, and cooperative abilities, will be affected by the sleep patterns of group members,” they note. “By collecting data on sleep along with social interactions and employing our proposed analytical tools, we can start to uncover the adaptive functions and evolutionary trade-offs of sleep that individual-level studies may overlook.”
