UMMS Affiliation

Department of Neurology

Publication Date

2018-01-19

Document Type

Article

Disciplines

Neuroscience and Neurobiology

Abstract

Sociality has beneficial effects on fitness, and timing the activities of animals may be critical. Social cues could influence daily rhythmic activities via direct effects on the circadian clock or on processes that bypass it (masking), but these possibilities remain incompletely addressed. We investigated the effects of social cues on the circadian body temperature (Tb) rhythms in pairs of co-housed and isolated grass rats, Arvicanthis niloticus (a social species), in constant darkness (DD). Cohabitation did not induce synchronization of circadian Tb rhythms. However, socio-sexual history did affect circadian properties: accelerating the clock in sexually experienced males and females in DD and advancing rhythm phase in the females in a light-dark cycle. To address whether synchronization occurs at an ultradian scale, we analyzed Tb and activity rhythms in pairs of co-housed sisters or couples in DD. Regardless of pair type, co-housing doubled the percentage of time individuals were simultaneously active without increasing individual activity levels, suggesting that activity bouts were synchronized by redistribution over 24 h. Together, our laboratory findings show that social cues affect individual "time allocation" budgets via mechanisms at multiple levels of biological organization. We speculate that in natural settings these effects could be adaptive, especially for group-living animals.

Keywords

Circadian regulation, Neurophysiology

Rights and Permissions

© The Author(s) 2018. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the . If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

DOI of Published Version

10.1038/s41598-018-19365-3

Source

Sci Rep. 2018 Jan 19;8(1):1202. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-19365-3. Link to article on publisher's site

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Scientific reports

Related Resources

Link to Article in PubMed

PubMed ID

29352256

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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