Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Gamboa, Panama.
Department of Biology and Redpath Museum, McGill University, Quebec, Canada.
J Exp Zool A Ecol Integr Physiol. 2024 Dec;341(10):1097-1110. doi: 10.1002/jez.2860. Epub 2024 Jul 25.
Sleep is associated with many costs, but is also important to survival, with a lack of sleep impairing cognitive function and increasing mortality. Sleeping in groups could alleviate sleep-associated costs, or could introduce new costs if social sleeping disrupts sleep. Working with the Jamaican fruit bat (Artibeus jamaicensis), we aimed to: (1) describe sleep architecture, (2) assess how sleeping in groups affects sleep, and (3) quantify total sleep time and identify rapid eye movement (REM) sleep using behavioral indicators that complement physiological evidence of sleep. Twenty-five adult bats were captured in Panama and recorded sleeping in an artificial roost enclosure. Three bats were fitted with an electromyograph and accelerometer and video recorded sleeping alone in controlled laboratory settings. The remaining 22 bats were assigned to differing social configurations (alone, dyad, triad, and tetrad) and video recorded sleeping in an outdoor flight cage. We found that sleep was highly variable among individuals (ranging from 2 h 53 min to 9 h 39 min over a 12-h period). Although we did not detect statistically significant effects and our sample size was limited, preliminary trends suggest that male bats may sleep longer than females, and individuals sleeping in groups may sleep longer than individuals sleeping alone. We also found a high correspondence between total sleep time quantified visually and quantified using actigraphy (with a 2-min immobility threshold) and identified physiological correlates of behaviorally-defined REM. These results serve as a starting point for future work on the ecology and evolution of sleep in bats and other wild mammals.
睡眠会带来许多成本，但它对生存也很重要，缺乏睡眠会损害认知功能并增加死亡率。群体睡眠可以减轻与睡眠相关的成本，但如果社交睡眠扰乱了睡眠，则可能会带来新的成本。我们与牙买加果蝠（Artibeus jamaicensis）合作，旨在：（1）描述睡眠结构，（2）评估群体睡眠如何影响睡眠，以及（3）使用行为指标来量化总睡眠时间并识别快速眼动（REM）睡眠，这些行为指标补充了睡眠的生理证据。我们在巴拿马捕获了 25 只成年蝙蝠，并记录了它们在人工栖息地中的睡眠情况。有三只蝙蝠被安装了肌电图和加速度计，并在受控的实验室环境中单独睡眠时进行了视频记录。其余 22 只蝙蝠被分配到不同的社交配置（单独、双体、三体和四体）中，并在户外飞行笼中进行视频记录。我们发现个体之间的睡眠差异很大（在 12 小时的时间内，睡眠时间从 2 小时 53 分钟到 9 小时 39 分钟不等）。尽管我们没有检测到统计学上的显著影响，而且我们的样本量有限，但初步趋势表明，雄性蝙蝠的睡眠时间可能比雌性长，而群体睡眠的个体可能比单独睡眠的个体睡眠时间更长。我们还发现，通过视觉和使用活动记录仪（使用 2 分钟的不动阈值）量化的总睡眠时间之间存在高度一致性，并确定了行为定义的 REM 的生理相关性。这些结果为未来研究蝙蝠和其他野生动物的睡眠生态和进化提供了起点。
