Bats may broadcast their personalities to others from a distance, new experiments suggest, which could play into social dynamics within a colony.
. Bats might broadcast their personalities to others from a distance, which could play into social dynamics within a colony, the finding suggests.
“This study is a major step forward in our understanding of behavioral types in bats and how those relate to patterns of social vocalization,” saysDespite vocalizations being widespread in the animal kingdom, the idea that they could reflect an individual behavioral type is relatively unexplored. Bats offer a good case study because the flying mammals are both highly social and vocal, using
Behavioral ecologist Theresa Schabacker of the Free University of Berlin wanted to see if bats’ social calls also reflected their personality traits, such as how exploratory they were. During fieldwork in the Santa Rosa National Park in Costa Rica, she and her colleagues captured 60 wild male Pallas’s long-tongued bats (. In a series of trials, the researchers brought individual bats to an experimental site at night.
Observations and statistical analysis showed that bats consistently differed in the number of alert calls they produced. Bats found to be bolder at feeding, more curious with the ball and exploratory in their new environment were also more likely to sound alerts. And the more agitated the bats were — acting restless and flying for longer — the more sounds they made.
How exactly the various behavioral types play into social hierarchies is also unknown. Yet bats are known to eavesdrop on the echolocation and social calls of others near them in flight, Gillam says, so this intel could be of benefit. “What if bolder individuals are better at finding insect patches?” she asks. “Perhaps bats encountering a bold individual during flight might benefit from following it.
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