Diurnal primates spend around half of their lifetime sleeping or inactive. These nocturnal behaviors are considerably understudied compared to daytime activities. While it is well established that sleep quality diminishes with age in humans, little is known about the effects of advanced age on sleep in our closest primate relatives. We aimed to describe captive chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) sleep patterns and examine whether individual sleep quality changed over an 11-yr period. We recorded the individual night rooms of 12 chimpanzees for six nights using infrared video cameras and analyzed 72 nights (936 h) of video. To evaluate long-term changes, we compared our data from 2018–2019 with previously published data from 2007–2008 on the same individuals living under the same conditions. We used complete inactivity and a head-down, lying posture as a proxy measurement for sleep. Each night individuals slept a mean of 10.5 (± SD 1.8) h and woke up 15.1 (± 3.6) times. The mean duration of sleep bouts was 45.4 (± 16.8) and the mean duration of awake bouts was 10.2 (± 8.2) min. We found that as chimpanzees aged they experienced significantly more frequent awakenings and shorter sleep bouts (i.e., more fragmented sleep), but nightly sleep duration and the length of awake bouts did not differ significantly between the two study periods. Our results suggest that chimpanzees experience some changes in sleep with age similar to those in humans and other animals.

昼夜灵长类动物一生中约有一半时间睡眠或不活动。与白天的活动相比，这些夜间行为被大大地研究了。众所周知，人类的睡眠质量会随着年龄的增长而降低，但对于我们最接近的灵长类近亲中的高龄对睡眠的影响知之甚少。我们的目的是描述圈养的黑猩猩（Pan troglodytes）的睡眠方式，并检查11年内个人的睡眠质量是否发生了变化。我们使用红外摄像机记录了12个黑猩猩在6个晚上内的各个夜晚房间，并分析了72个晚上（936小时）的视频。为了评估长期变化，我们将2018-2019年的数据与之前发布的2007-2008年的数据进行了比较，这些数据涉及生活在相同条件下的同一个人。我们使用完全不运动和低头，仰卧的姿势来衡量睡眠。每天晚上，每个人平均睡10.5（±SD 1.8）h，醒来15.1（±3.6）次。睡眠发作的平均持续时间为45.4（±16.8）分钟，觉醒发作的平均持续时间为10.2（±8.2）分钟。我们发现，随着黑猩猩年龄的增长，他们的觉醒频率会大大提高，睡眠周期会缩短（例如，睡眠更加分散），但在两个研究期间之间，夜间睡眠时间和清醒周期的长短没有显着差异。我们的结果表明，黑猩猩的睡眠会随着年龄的增长而发生变化，与人类和其他动物的行为类似。