CitySleep · SLEEP IN THE CITY: How does artificial light at night affect EEG-based measures of sleep?
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-04-01 → 2020-03-31
- EU contribution
- €160,800
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
SLEEP IN THE CITY: How does artificial light at night affect EEG-based measures of sleep?
Anthropogenic environments expose organisms to an array of novel stressors such as light, noise, and chemical pollution. These disturbance factors may interfere with adaptive behaviors and activate stress responses, with deleterious fitness effects. Sleep is a fundamental component of animals’ daily life and sleep deprivation has well-documented deleterious effects on health status. Thus, a primary aim of this project was elucidating whether sleep disruption occurs as a consequence of exposure to light and noise pollution, using a model species, the great tit (Parus major). In addition, I explored how noise, light and chemical pollution affect other aspects of behavior and physiology in these songbirds, including underexplored effects on developing nestlings (e.g. telomere dynamics), and effects on sexual coloration and parental behavior in adults. Finally, I strove to elucidate intraspecific differences in sensitivity to disturbance. Animal personalities, or individually-repeatable differences in behavior, have now been widely documented and may affect sensitivity to disturbance, especially via hormonal correlates. This project has yielded valuable results, which advance the state-of-the-art. First, results suggest that exposure to ALAN and anthropogenic noise have deleterious effects on developing organisms, providing motivation for mitigation policies. In addition, noise exposure did not affect all nestlings equivalently, suggesting that identifying individual traits that affect stress sensitivity is important to detecting effects of human disturbance. Second, research on adults demonstrated that sexually-selected, carotenoid-based coloration is reduced in birds breeding closer to roads and with higher feather metal concentrations, with important implications for sexual signaling dynamics in anthropogenic landscapes. In addition, the nature of the noise regime, personality type and sex interacted to predict effects of noise exposure on nestling provisioning behavior, again suggesting intraspecific variation in sensitivity to disturbance. Finally, despite significant individual level variation in the effect of ALAN on sleep, effects were not dependent on personality type, as characterized by novel environment exploration behavior. A study involving the effect of constant and variable anthropogenic noise regimes on sleep behavior is currently in the analysis stage.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Sleep is an adaptive state of inactivity, which plays critical functions including replenishing energy and neurological recovery. Artificial light at night (ALAN) is ubiquitous in the urbanizing world, and has the potential to substantially alter sleep patterns. Our understanding of how ALAN affects sleep in wild animals is seriously limited, because past studies have relied on behavioural metrics of sleep, which cannot distinguish different types of sleep (rapid eye movement (REM) versus slow wave sleep (SWS)), or accurately quantify sleep intensity (amount of slow waves within SWS). In this study (CitySleep), the Experienced Researcher (ER) will use state-of-the-art neurologgers to obtain electroencephalogram (EEG) data on sleep in wild great tits (Parus major) exposed to ALAN. She will obtain data from free-living nestlings and from adults in semi-natural aviaries. Great tits sleep in nest boxes that can be experimentally exposed to ALAN, and have served as a model species in behavioural sleep studies. The ER will work with the University of Antwerp’s Behavioural Ecology and Ecophysiology (BECO) Group, which has developed methods to manipulate ALAN inside boxes, and has high-quality publications on how ALAN affects sleep behaviour. She will receive expert training on implanting neurologgers from Prof. A. Vyssotski (University of Zurich), and training on interpreting EEG data from Dr. N. Rattenborg’s Avian Sleep Research Group (Max Planck Institute). She will contribute expert knowledge of urban ecology, stress physiology and bird handling, and introduce neurologgers to the BECO Group, facilitating a major advance in research methodology. Results will be disseminated through top-tier publications, international conferences and public engagement, and used to advance scientific knowledge and motivate environmental policy changes. The ER will gain skills that will propel her research to a higher level and allow her to secure a permanent research position.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT ANTWERPEN · AntwerpenCoordinatorBelgium
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union