Every day nectar-feeding animals face an energetic challenge during foraging: they must locate and select flowers that provide nectar with adequate amounts of sugar to cover their very high energy needs. To understand this decision-making process, it is crucial to know how accurately sugar concentration differences can be discriminated. In a controlled laboratory setting, we offered the nectar-specialist bat Leptonycteris yerbabuenae the choice between different sugar solutions covering the entire concentration range of bat-pollinated plants (3–33%). When feeding on solutions below 10% sugar concentration Leptonycteris yerbabuenae was unable to cover its energetic demands due to physiological constraints. Their capability to discriminate sugar concentrations outperformed any other nectar-feeding animal studied to date. At sugar concentrations below 15%, Leptonycteris yerbabuenae can discriminate solutions differing by only 0.5%. The bats may utilize this fine-tuned ability to select nectar from flowers with reward qualities that provide them with the necessary amount of energy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.