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posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 01 2019, @03:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the sharing-your-bugs dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Vampire bats that share food and groom each other in captivity are more likely to stick together when they're released back into the wild, find researchers in a study reported on October 31 in the journal Current Biology. While most previous evidence of "friendship" in animals comes from research in primates, these findings suggest that vampire bats can also form cooperative, friendship-like social relationships.

"The social relationships in vampire bats that we have been observing in captivity are pretty robust to changes in the social and physical environment -- even when our captive groups consist of a fairly random sample of bats from a wild colony," said Simon Ripperger  of the Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science in Berlin. "When we released these bats back into their wild colony, they chose to associate with the same individuals that were their cooperation partners during their time in captivity."

He and study co-lead author Gerald Carter  of The Ohio State University say their findings show that repeated social interactions they've observed in the lab aren't just an artifact of captivity. Not all relationships survived the transition from the lab back into the wild. But, similar to human experience, cooperative relationships or friendships among vampire bats appear to result from a combination of social preferences together with external environment influences or circumstances.

Carter has been studying vampire bat social relationships in captivity since 2010. For the new study, he wondered whether the same relationships and networks he'd been manipulating in the lab would persist or break down after their release in the wild, where the bats could go anywhere and associate with hundreds of other individuals.

Studying social networks in wild bats at very high resolution hadn't been possible until now. To do it, Simon Ripperger and his colleagues in electrical engineering and computer sciences developed novel proximity sensors. These tiny sensors, which are lighter than a penny, allowed them to capture social networks of entire social groups of bats and update them every few seconds. By linking what they knew about the bats' relationships in captivity to what they observed in the wild, they were able to make this leap toward better understanding social bonds in vampire bats.

Journal Reference:

Ripperger and Carter et al. Vampire bats that cooperate in the lab maintain their social networks in the wild. Current Biology, 2019 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.10.024


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:40AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:40AM (#914966)

    My Gawd you are an idiot, Runaway! Vampire bats are smarter than you, and more caring and generous and social justicy.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:57AM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:57AM (#914973) Journal

    Oh yes, vampire bats are social justicy alright. They fly along, until they see a tasty-looking victim, then they plop down on that victim and bite a large enough hole to get the blood flowing. Well - come to think of it, that IS what SJW's are all about. They want to make their betters bleed.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @11:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @11:45PM (#915162)

      well, at least they bleed us that way, rather than yelling about capitalism and patriots while telling us what to do in our bedrooms.