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Volume 16, Number 10, Issue of May 15, 1996 pp. 3500-3506
Copyright ©1996 Society for Neuroscience

The Echidna Tachyglossus aculeatus Combines REM and Non-REM Aspects in a Single Sleep State: Implications for the Evolution of Sleep

Received Oct. 27, 1995; revised Feb. 29, 1996; accepted Mar. 1, 1996.

J. M. Siegel¹, P. R. Manger², R. Nienhuis¹, H. M. Fahringer¹, and J. D. Pettigrew²

¹ VAMC Sepulveda and UCLA School of Medicine, Neurobiology Research, Sepulveda, California 91343, and ² Vision, Touch and Hearing Research Centre, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Placental and marsupial mammals exist in three states of consciousness: waking, non-REM sleep, and REM sleep. We now report that the echidna Tachyglossus aculeatus, a representative of the earliest branch of mammalian evolution (the monotremes), does not have the pattern of neuronal activity of either of the sleep states seen in nonmonotreme mammals. Echidna sleep was characterized by increased brainstem unit discharge variability, as in REM sleep. However, the discharge rate decreased and the EEG was synchronized, as in nonREM sleep. Our results suggest that REM and non-REM sleep evolved as a differentiation of a single, phylogenetically older sleep state. We hypothesize that the physiological changes that occur during postnatal sleep development parallel certain aspects of the changes that have occurred during the evolution of sleep-waking states in mammals.

Key words: sleep; monotreme; evolution; phylogeny; development; REM

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