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

ABSTRACT: Incorporating novel food sources into their diet is crucial for animals in changing environments. Although the utilization of novel food sources can be learned individually, learning socially from experienced conspecifics may facilitate this task and enable a transmission of foraging-related innovations across a population. In anthropogenically modified habitats, bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera) frequently adapt their feeding strategy to novel food sources, and corresponding social learning processes have been experimentally demonstrated in frugivorous and animalivorous species. However, comparable experiments are lacking for nectarivorous flower-visiting bats, even though their utilization of novel food sources in anthropogenically altered habitats is often observed and even discussed as the r

SUBMITTER: Rose A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10442281 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature