Vampire bats share blood meals with their besties
Bats would call out and meet up during hunts to share food
Researchers have discovered vampire bats meeting up with animals they have a social relationship with to share a meal while foraging, a behaviour that is shedding light on cooperation in the animal kingdom.
Vampire bats are a species of interest for scientists who study social behaviour in animals because they can have incredibly close bonds, grooming each other and even regurgitating their own food to feed other non-related bats.
"This food sharing behaviour is very costly. I mean, the one bat is actually regurgitating food to another bat," said Gerald Carter, co-author of the study. "We don't have to train the bats to cooperate. This is something they do naturally."
In this study, recently published in the journal PLOS Biology, the team attached tiny proximity sensors to 50 female vampire bats, including 23 that had been captive in Carter's lab for nearly two years. Then the bats were observed as they left the roost and foraged for blood around a cattle pasture in Tolé, Panama.
What they found was that bats that spent the most time together in the roost grooming and feeding, would call out to each other and join up once they had found a meal. An unfriendly bat would get chased away.
"They recognize each other from these calls that they make, and they will go towards individuals that they have a food sharing relationship with," Carter told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald. "So the relationships the bats have in captivity are maintained when we release them in the wild. The relationships they have in the roost are extending out into the cattle pastures."
Gerald Carter is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. You can listen to his full interview with Bob McDonald at the link above.
Produced and written by Amanda Buckiewicz