SGER: Collaborative Research: Sleep in Nocturnal Bird Migrants, an Interdisciplinary Study

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Collaborative Research: Sleep in nocturnal bird migrants, an interdisciplinary study Frank R. MooreUniversity of Southern MississippiAnimals spend their lives either awake or asleep. Wakefulness allows animals to interact effectively with their environment, while waking performance is contingent on sleep, the function of which remains largely unknown. An animal may mitigate the conflict between sleep and wakefulness by engaging in unihemispheric sleep, a unique state during which one cerebral hemisphere sleeps while the other remains awake. This interdisciplinary, collaborative project takes advantage of nocturnal bird migrants as a natural model system to study the behavioral and physiological properties of sleep, the consequences of naturally occurring sleep loss, and the compensatory adjustments that accompany sleep loss. Most bird species are active during the day and sleep at night, exceQt during migration when their migratory flights occur at night. By traveling at night a migrating bird experiences reduced threat of predation, improved atmospheric conditions for flight, and more time to feed during the day. Advantages of nocturnal migration aside, birds necessarily lose sleep by migrating at night and changes in sleep behavior could have adverse consequences. Laboratory and field studies of sleep in the Swainson' s Thrush, an intercontinental bird migrant, are combined to ask how seasonally sleep deprived birds compensate for that deprivation at the behavioral and physiological level. The contribution of the study is measured in terms of both application of methodology to the study of sleep and understanding the function of sleep.