Atmospheric methane levels increased over geological formations in Northern Siberia following a heat wave in 2020, suggesting that permafrost thaw releases methane from reservoirs.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Edited by Gene E. Robinson, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL, and approved November 23, 2010 (received for review June 30, 2010)
Abstract
Sleep is essential for basic survival, and insufficient sleep leads to a variety of dysfunctions. In humans, one of the most profound consequences of sleep deprivation is imprecise or irrational communication, demonstrated by degradation in signaling as well as in receiving information. Communication in nonhuman animals may suffer analogous degradation of precision, perhaps with especially damaging consequences for social animals. However, society-specific consequences of sleep loss have rarely been explored, and no function of sleep has been ascribed to a truly social (eusocial) organism in the context of its society. Here we show that sleep-deprived honey bees (Apis mellifera) exhibit reduced precision when signaling direction information to food sources in their waggle dances. The deterioration of the honey bee's ability to communicate is expected to reduce the foraging efficiency of nestmates. This study demonstrates the impact of sleep deprivation on signaling in a eusocial animal. If the deterioration of signals made by sleep-deprived honey bees and humans is generalizable, then imprecise communication may be one detrimental effect of sleep loss shared by social organisms.
Footnotes
- 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: barrett{at}pupating.org.
Author contributions: B.A.K. and T.D.S. designed research; B.A.K. and M.K.W. performed research; A.K. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; U.G.M. supplied equipment for data transcription; B.A.K. analyzed data; and B.A.K., A.K., M.K.W., U.G.M., and T.D.S. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1009439108/-/DCSupplemental.
Sleep deprivation impairs precision of waggle dance signaling in honey bees
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