Descrizione del progetto
Il primo studio in assoluto sulle dinamiche del sonno collettivo di gruppi di animali
Il sonno è intrinsecamente legato al benessere fisico e cognitivo. Molti studi hanno valutato gli effetti del sonno, anche se principalmente su individui in laboratori del sonno. Le intricate dinamiche dei comportamenti di gruppo e il loro ruolo nei modelli di sonno sono inaccessibili con questi metodi. Il progetto CO-SLEEP, finanziato dal Consiglio europeo della ricerca, integrerà la tecnologia nei metodi di osservazione per misurare e modellizzare le dinamiche collettive del sonno tra i babbuini selvatici. Il team seguirà e monitorerà 30 gruppi di babbuini selvatici utilizzando la localizzazione GPS e l’accelerometria, la scansione laser 3D, la videografia termica e la modellizzazione computazionale avanzata. Lo studio di CO-SLEEP è il primo a misurare il comportamento collettivo del sonno di gruppi di animali in un contesto socialmente ed ecologicamente rilevante.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Istituzione ospitante
78464 Konstanz
Germania