The ecology of resting behaviour in terrestrial vertebrates, and potential effects of anthropization

2025 · doi:10.32942/x2hs9m
preprint OA: closed
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This paper is a preprint review examining the ecology of “resting” behaviours—quiet wakefulness, sleep, and daily torpor—in terrestrial vertebrates, focusing on shared physiological and environmental drivers and their ecological outcomes in wild settings. It proposes that resting strategies can flexibly respond to constraints such as metabolism, resource availability, predation risk, and thermoregulation, with additional emphasis on how resting timing, location, duration, and social context shape strategy under variable conditions. A major caveat is that it synthesizes existing knowledge rather than presenting new empirical data, and it explicitly notes that research on how anthropization disrupts patterns of inactivity is largely unexplored. The paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

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This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Inactive behaviours are a major component of animals’ lives, generally representing important proportions of time budgets. The conditions in which they occur are thus likely to have key effects on individual fitness. Yet, relatively little research has focused on the determinants and ecological consequences of inactive behaviours, likely in part because of the inherent difficulties associated with observing inactive animals. In particular, the effects of anthropization as a disruptor of patterns of inactivity are largely unexplored. In this review, we propose to bring quiet wakefulness, sleep, and daily torpor together under the term of “resting”, to facilitate the study of inactivity in terrestrial vertebrates, in wild settings. We detail the shared physiological and environmental drivers of resting behaviours, as well as their ecological outcomes. We suggest that the diversity of resting behaviours enables animals to respond flexibly to constraints linked with metabolism, resource availability, predation risk, and thermoregulation. We detail how the location, timing, duration, and social context in which resting occurs shape a resting strategy that may be adjusted in response to variable environmental conditions. Finally, we explore how anthropization may affect the resting strategies of terrestrial vertebrates through direct disturbances, alterations of landscapes and communities, and the effects of climate change. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2HS9M Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences behavioural adjustments, daily torpor, disturbance, Human activity, Inactivity, perturbation, Sleep Published: 2025-11-10 21:43 Last Updated: 2025-11-10 21:43 CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Language: English

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