Collective Dynamics of Sleep

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, limiting our ability to understand how social environments shape, and are shaped by, the sleep patterns of their members.

My goal is to bring the study of sleep into the collective context, understand how social processes structure the sleep patterns of individuals, groups and populations, and test how gregarious animals navigate the opportunities and constraints imposed by sleeping as part of a group.

To do this, I will integrate cutting-edge technologies with traditional field-observation methods to measure and model the collective dynamics of sleep among wild baboons.

To continuously monitor movement, position, and sleep of baboons at the individual, group, and population levels, I will use GPS and accelerometry tracking of members of 30 troops of wild baboons.

This will be combined with 3-D laser scanning of the physical sleep environment, overnight thermal videography, sleep-disruption field experiments, focal sampling of social behaviors, and advanced computational modeling to shed light on how differentiated and multi-faceted social relationships shape individual and collective sleep decisions, and how these decisions, in turn, shape the overall social dynamics of groups.

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.