To sleep or not to sleep: the ecology of sleep in artificial organisms |
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Authors: | Alberto Acerbi Patrick McNamara Charles L Nunn |
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Institution: | (1) Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany;(2) Department of Neurology, Boston VA Medical Centre and Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA 02130, USA;(3) Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA |
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Abstract: | Background All animals thus far studied sleep, but little is known about the ecological factors that generate differences in sleep characteristics
across species, such as total sleep duration or division of sleep into multiple bouts across the 24-hour period (i.e., monophasic
or polyphasic sleep activity). Here we address these questions using an evolutionary agent-based model. The model is spatially
explicit, with food and sleep sites distributed in two clusters on the landscape. Agents acquire food and sleep energy based
on an internal circadian clock coded by 24 traits (one for each hour of the day) that correspond to "genes" that evolve by
means of a genetic algorithm. These traits can assume three different values that specify the agents' behavior: sleep (or
search for a sleep site), eat (or search for a food site), or flexibly decide action based on relative levels of sleep energy
and food energy. Individuals with higher fitness scores leave more offspring in the next generation of the simulation, and
the model can therefore be used to identify evolutionarily adaptive circadian clock parameters under different ecological
conditions. |
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