Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 36, Issue 5, September–October 1988, Pages 1407-1419
Animal Behaviour

Sleep in mammals

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0003-3472(88)80211-2Get rights and content

Abstract

Quiet sleep (QS) was correlated with a different set of constitutional variables from those associated with active sleep (AS), in a sample of 69 species of mammals. The time spent in quiet sleep was negatively correlated with body size and basal metabolic rate. The latter relationship remained even after controlling for the effects of body weight. Neither the total time spent in active sleep, nor active sleep as a percentage of total sleep time was significantly correlated with body weight or metabolic rate. Altricial species spend more time in active sleep than do precocial species. The time between the onset of successive episodes of active sleep, the AS-QS cycle length, was positively correlated with body weight. For their body sizes, species that live in temperate regions have shorter AS-QS cycles than those living in tropical or sub-tropical regions. Correlations between patterns of sleep and adult brain weight probably result from the confounding effects of body weight. These findings were used to evaluate several explanations for interspecific differences in patterns of sleep among mammals.

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    Present address: School of Biological Science, University of New South Wales, P.O. Box 1, Kensington, Sydney, N.S.W. 2033, Australia.

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