Decrease in monocular sleep after sleep deprivation in the domestic chicken

We investigated the trade-off between sleep need and alertness, by challenging chickens to modify their monocular sleep. We sleep deprived domestic chickens (Gallus domesticus) to increase their sleep need. We found that in response to sleep deprivation the fraction of monocular sleep within sleep decreased in favour of binocular sleep. These data suggest that chickens with a high sleep need choose to perform more binocular sleep, possibly at the cost of reduced alertness.