Statistical analysis and modeling of the temperature-dependent sleep behavior of drosophila Original Research Article

The sleep behavior of drosophila is analyzed under different temperatures. The activity per minute of the flies is recorded automatically. Sleep for a fruit fly is defined as the periods without any activity and longer than 5 minutes. Several parameters such as total sleep time, circadian sleep profile, quality of sleep are analyzed. The sleep behaviors are significantly different for flies at different temperature. Interestingly, the durations of daytime sleep periods show a common scale-free power law distribution. We propose a stochastic model to simulate the activities of the population of neurons which regulate the dynamics of sleep–wake process to explain the distribution of daytime sleep.