Alexandre Goerlinger, Kévin Tougeron 

Although sleep is essential for the survival of all animals, this behaviour is far from being studied in all species, especially in invertebrates. In this dissertation, we attempted to bring together current knowledge about sleep with a focus on arthropods, which have been much less studied in this regard than vertebrates. While some species appear to exhibit rest periods that combine all the characteristics of sleep, the existence of this state in most arthropods remains ambiguous, if not unknown. Even among insects, the arthropods most commonly seen in papers about sleep, the number of species studied is extremely low, compared to the sheer number of species that belong to the phylum of arthropods. This results in a very strong bias towards vertebrates, and especially mammals, whose sleep has been thoroughly studied in many different species, while this class includes very few species of the animal kingdom, in proportion. This taxonomic bias is explained by historical lack of interest in the sleep of arthropods, which however tends to be reduced, given that the current context of global changes encourages biologists to study the impact of anthropogenically-driven sleep disturbances in insects on the balance of ecosystems.