Reams of paper have fallen off the calendar since my last post, and certainly since my last last post. And so, let me kindly provide an update on the professional goings-on in 2025 and the first half of 2026.
I suppose it is easiest to begin where things left off. “Where is the book you promised?”, I hear you exclaim with exasperation. I feel it, too. While it seems a simple matter of writing a book, and simpler still with two outstanding co-authors with names of Barrett Klein (University of Wisconsin, La Crosse) and Niels Rattenborg (Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, Seewiesen), editing a book is far more time-consuming process than I had imagined. The draft has been undergoing a productive back-and-forth between ourselves and our patient editor. It has been a fulfilling experience of growth to shift ones writing style from the scientific to the popular, where language is less formal, more accessible, and of a prose laden with metaphor that does not always come naturally. We’re getting there, but I must temper expectations and revise that publication date to, say, sometime in 2027. Owing to the focus on this Somnozoology text, other publications necessarily took a back seat in 2025, something I yearn to remedy in 2026 and beyond.
In 2025, I was fortunate enough to receive an invitation to present at The Company of Biologists centenary in Liverpool (UK). Here, my contribution was to the Sensory Perception in a Changing World track. Here, I met legends, including Almut Kelber (Lund University), Craig Franklin (The University of Queensland), and my inspirational comparative animal physiology lecturer (in the year 2000) from the University of Guelph, Patricia Wright. I also met lecturers nearer the start of their independent careers. Notably, potential abounds for future collaborations with Svenja Tidau (Bangor University) to dive into the intertidal zone for marine-based sleep research. The trip allowed also an invited review in the Journal of Experimental Biology, I co-wrote with dear Sleep Friend, Anne Aulsebrook (Deakin University). I’d be remiss not to mention the fabulous chance to meet up with Max Planck alum, and long-time friend, Sue Anne Zollinger (Manchester Metropolitan University). Continuing our adventures shared in Berlin the year before at ICN, we were able to tour the Beatles’ haunts long on my bucket list. (As foreshadowing and further suspense-whetting, Sue Anne and I hope to share with you soon the fruits of our recent labours presently in review.) A grand and heart-felt Thank You to The Company of Biologists for the experience!
In early 2025, Davide Dominoni (presently at the University of Glasgow, yet like Sue Anne, an old friend from the Max Planck days) rekindled conversations that began in Andechs, Oberbayern some 16 years ago. Davide, of course, is a world-leading urban ecologist who focusses on the behaviour and physiology of urban birds, often tits, blackbirds, and now owls. When we were young brown-haired boys, we talked of merging our expertise to study sleep in wild city-living birds. Now as grey-haired (or lesser-haired) men, we’re able to revisit those conversations. Starting with financial support from the Australian Academy of Science, Davide was able to come to Melbourne in April (2026), and then we were off to Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef to study the effect of light pollution on sleep physiology in wild black noddies. By correlating levels of oxalic acid, a biomarker for sleep loss (at least in humans, rodents, and seemingly antechinus marsupials), we sought to determine whether noddies roosting nearer artificial light at night had evidence for disrupted sleep (less oxalic acid) and circadian disruption (less melatonin). The former has been analyzed; the latter will be this or next week. More to come!
The final tale for this update takes a meandering path. The 2024 ICN meeting was great for seeing Sue Anne, and also for serendipitously meeting Sissel Norland and Oleg Tolstenkov (University of Bergen), where a chance encounter lead to conversations around imaging nervous system activity from tunicates (non-vertebrate chordates). Post-Berlin, I meet with their lab head, Marios Chatzigeorgiou, which began productive chats about overlapping interests: the evolution of vertebrate sleep and sleep states through the study of neuronal firing in tunicates. Expanding these discussions to include oceanographer Claire Paris-Limouzy (University of Miami), we had ourselves a research team, which would later secure funding from the Human Frontier Science Program. Together, we will look for signs of sleep in (free-swimming) larval and (sessile) adult tunicates both behaviourally and using Marios’ imaging expertise, and how the biological need for sleep influences plankton dispersal in the ocean, using Claire’s modelling expertise. The grant will also allow us to explore the evolutionary origins of sleep through study of the simplest animals – those lacking a nervous system altogether – placozoans and sponges. Am I dreaming? Watch this space as the work unfolds in 2027 through 2029!
Sleep Ecophysiology Group 