Sleep plays an important role in the lives of animals ranging from jellyfish to humans. To maintain adaptive waking cognitive performance, it is commonly thought that animals need to fulfill a fixed daily quota of sleep, an inherently dangerous state of reduced environmental awareness. However, studies of birds in the lab and wild indicate that the amount, type, and structure of sleep can be highly flexible in response to changing ecological demands. In this talk, I will provide an overview of our research on ecological flexibility in avian sleep, including responses to predation risk, adaptive sleeplessness in male polygamous sandpipers, sleep in flying frigatebirds, microsleeps in nesting penguins, and sleep-swimming in geese. By demonstrating that sleep is far more flexible than previously thought, birds pose a potentially informative challenge to current theories for the function of sleep.

About the speaker: Niels C. Rattenborg, PhD, is the head of the Avian Sleep research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Germany. He aims to gain insight into the evolution and functions of sleep through studying birds using various methods, including brain imaging. Rattenborg is also interested in understanding how birds reconcile the inherent need for sleep with ecological demands for wakefulness, such as avoiding predation, competing for mates, and flying non-stop for weeks at a time. He is pioneering the use of microchips to measure sleep-related brain activity in animals in the wild. Rattenborg received the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from the Sleep Research Society for demonstrating that birds can sleep in flight.