9417375 Berger This award will partially support the travel expenses for Dr. Ralph Berger of the Department of Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz, to enable him to travel to Tasmania, Australia to conduct cooperative research with Dr. Stewart Nicol of the Department of Physiology at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. The cooperative work will focus on a study of sleep in the echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus), a primitive egg-laying mammal unique to Australia. Current evolutionary theory of sleep maintains that slow wave sleep evolved in conjunction with endothermy (metabolic heat production), while rapid eye movement sleep (REM) emerged later in early ancestors of marsupial and placental mammals. This project will examine sleep in young echidnas at an ambient temperature and in a light/dark cycle similar to their natural habitat. Dr. Nicol has performed comparative thermoregulatory and metabolic studies on echidnas for several years; Dr. Berger contributes expertise in the comparative electrophysiology of sleep. In addition to the evolutionary significance of this project, information from the study may aid in the conservation and management of echidnas and other primitive mammals.
