Social facilitation in short-tailed fruit bats, Carollia perspicillata (Linnaeus)

Abstract

Group-living animals can potentially enhance their foraging performance and efficiency by obtaining information from others. Using PIT-tag data to study foraging behaviour in individual bats, we tested short-tailed fruit bats, Carollia perspicillata (Linnaeus), for evidence of local enhancement or social facilitation. To discriminate between these phenomena, we manipulated the presence of conspecifics while individuals searched for food. We quantified the time to find food and the order and sex of bats accessing the food, and any consistent associations between bats. Presence of conspecifics decreased the time needed to find food. We found no evidence that pairs of individuals consistently fed together; however, bats of the same sex tended to feed closer in time with one another. The same individuals consistently accessed the food first, and males found food more quickly than females. Our results provide evidence of social facilitation, with bats finding food more quickly in a group than alone.

Neophobia and innovation in critically endangered Bali myna,Leucopsar rothschildi

“…Other cognitive aspects that are relevant to adaptability, such as social learning i.e., learning from others, would also be useful to test for applying to conservation actions. For example, social facilitation during foraging (capuchin monkeys [35]; carrion crows [32]; bats [36]) and exploring the link between different cognitive abilities, like innovation and social learning [24,25]. Our present finding that Bali myna are influenced by social context indicates that this would be a useful avenue for future work.…”

Social information facilitates learning about novel food sources in adult flower-visiting bats

“…In the presence of a knowledgeable demonstrator, focal bats learned to exploit the novel food source faster and more often than compared to the control situation, which implicates a transmission of information between bats. Since we never tested focal bats alone in our setup, we cannot assess whether the mere presence of a conspecific may have additionally facilitated the learning process, as social facilitation was reported to be beneficial for foraging frugivorous bats (Wright et al 2020 ), and also flower-visiting bats are probably bolder and more readily interacting with novel objects if conspecifics are present (Hörmann et al 2021 ). Although our experiment was not designed to reveal the actual mechanism behind the observed social transmission, it is likely that the demonstrators’ behavior of approaching and feeding guided the focal bats’ attention towards the array and the novel food source, or that focal bats used the demonstrators’ hovering flights as a cue for the presence of food in this location (cf.…”

“…If a bat remained unsuccessful, we used the maximal experimental time of 180 min as a conservative approximation of their learning time (cf. Wright et al 2020 ). Our design with one rewarding and two unrewarding food sources of the same shape allowed us to additionally gain information on whether focal bats rather learned via the location (i.e., food source visited by demonstrator), or by generalizing the demonstrated behavior towards the other, not demonstrated food sources.…”

Neophobia and innovation in Critically Endangered Bali myna, Leucopsar rothschildi

“…learning from others, would also be useful to test for applying to conservation actions. For example, social facilitation during foraging (tufted capuchin monkeys [ 51 ]; carrion crows [ 49 ]; short-tailed bats ( Carollia perspicillata ) [ 52 ]) and exploring the link between different abilities, like innovation and social learning [ 34 , 35 ]. Our present finding that Bali myna interactions with novelty and problem-solving tasks are influenced by social context indicates that this would be a useful avenue for future work.…”