Reinforcement Learning Enables Resource Partitioning in Foraging Bats.

ABSTRACT: Every evening, from late spring to mid-summer, tens of thousands of hungry lactating female lesser long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) emerge from their roost and navigate over the Sonoran Desert, seeking for nectar and pollen [1, 2]. The bats roost in a huge maternal colony that is far from the foraging grounds but allows their pups to thermoregulate [3] while the mothers are foraging. Thus, the mothers have to fly tens of kilometers to the foraging sites-fields with thousands of Saguaro cacti [4, 5]. Once at the field, they must compete with many other bats over the same flowering cacti. Several solutions have been suggested for this classical foraging task of exploiting a resource composed of many renewable food sources whose locations are fixed. Some animals randomly visit the

SUBMITTER: Goldshtein A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7575196 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature