Insectivorous bats integrate social information about species identity, conspecific activity and prey abundance to estimate cost-benefit ratio of interactions.

ABSTRACT: Animals can use inadvertent social information to improve fitness-relevant decisions, for instance about where to forage or with whom to interact. Since bats emit high-amplitude species-specific echolocation calls when flying, they provide a constant flow of inadvertent social information to others who can decode that acoustic information. Of particular interest is the rate of feeding buzzes-characteristic call sequences preceding any prey capture-which correlates with insect abundance. Previous studies investigating eavesdropping in bats yielded very different and in part contradictory results likely because they commonly focused on single species only, differed substantially in playback buzz rate and did usually not account for (baseline) conspecific activity. Our goal was to overcome th

SUBMITTER: Lewanzik D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6849779 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature