Urban fruit bats give birth earlier in the season compared to rural fruit bats.

Background: Urbanization is rapidly altering our ecosystem. While most wild species refrain from entering urban habitats, some flourish in cities and adapt to the new opportunities these offer. Urban individuals of various species have been shown to differ in physiology, morphology, and behavior compared to their rural counterparts.

Acoustic cognitive map-based navigation in echolocating bats.

Bats are known for their ability to use echolocation for obstacle avoidance and orientation. However, the extent to which bats utilize their highly local and directional echolocation for kilometer-scale navigation is unknown. In this study, we translocated wild Kuhl's pipistrelle bats and tracked their homing abilities while manipulating their visual, magnetic, and olfactory sensing and accurately tracked them using a new reverse GPS system.

Time-mapping and future-oriented behavior in free-ranging wild fruit bats.

Episodic memory and mental time travel have been viewed as uniquely human traits. This view began to shift with the development of behavioral criteria to assess what is referred to as "episodic-like memory" in animals. Key findings have ranged from evidence of what-where-when memory in scrub-jays, rats, and bees; through decision-making that impacts future foraging in frugivorous primates; to evidence of planning based on future needs in scrub-jays and tool use planning in great apes.

Mother bats facilitate pup navigation learning.

Learning where to forage and how to navigate to foraging sites are among the most essential skills that infants must acquire. How they do so is poorly understood. Numerous bat species carry their young in flight while foraging.

Urban bat pups take after their mothers and are bolder and faster learners than rural pups.

Background: Urbanization is rapidly changing our planet and animals that live in urban environments must quickly adjust their behavior. One of the most prevalent behavioral characteristics of urban dwelling animals is an increased level of risk-taking. Here, we aimed to reveal how urban fruitbats become risk-takers, and how they differ behaviorally from rural bats, studying both genetic and non-genetic factors that might play a role in the process.

Sick bats stay home alone: fruit bats practice social distancing when faced with an immunological challenge.

Along with its many advantages, social roosting imposes a major risk of pathogen transmission. How social animals reduce this risk is poorly documented. We used lipopolysaccharide challenge to imitate bacterial infection in both a captive and a free-living colony of an extremely social, long-lived mammal-the Egyptian fruit bat.

The ontogeny of a mammalian cognitive map in the real world.

How animals navigate over large-scale environments remains a riddle. Specifically, it is debated whether animals have cognitive maps. The hallmark of map-based navigation is the ability to perform shortcuts, i.

Food for Sex in Bats Revealed as Producer Males Reproduce with Scrounging Females.

Food sharing is often evolutionarily puzzling, because the provider's benefits are not always clear. Sharing among kin may increase indirect fitness [1], but when non-kin are involved, different mechanisms were suggested to act. Occasionally, "tolerated theft" [2, 3] is observed, merely because defending a resource is not cost effective.

Resource Ephemerality Drives Social Foraging in Bats.

Observations of animals feeding in aggregations are often interpreted as events of social foraging, but it can be difficult to determine whether the animals arrived at the foraging sites after collective search [1-4] or whether they found the sites by following a leader [5, 6] or even independently, aggregating as an artifact of food availability [7, 8]. Distinguishing between these explanations is important, because functionally, they might have very different consequences. In the first case, the animals could benefit from the presence of conspecifics, whereas in the second and third, they often suffer from increased competition [3, 9-13].

Persistent producer-scrounger relationships in bats.

Social foraging theory suggests that group-living animals gain from persistent social bonds, which lead to increased tolerance in competitive foraging and information sharing. Bats are among the most social mammals, often living in colonies of tens to thousands of individuals for dozens of years, yet little is known about their social foraging dynamics. We observed three captive bat colonies for over a year, quantifying >13,000 social foraging interactions.