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Social dominance and cooperation in female vampire bats.

ABSTRACT: When group-living animals develop individualized social relationships, they often regulate cooperation and conflict through a dominance hierarchy. Female common vampire bats have been an experimental system for studying cooperative relationships, yet surprisingly little is known about female conflict. Here, we recorded the outcomes of 1023 competitive interactions over food provided ad libitum in a captive colony of 33 vampire bats (24 adult females and their young). We found a weakly linear dominance hierarchy using three common metrics (Landau's h' measure of linearity, triangle transitivity and directional consistency). However, patterns of female dominance were less structured than in many other group-living mammals. Female social rank was not clearly predicted by body size, age, nor reproductive status, and competitive interactions were not correlated with kinship, grooming nor food sharing. We therefore found no evidence that females groomed or shared food up a hierarchy or that differences in rank explained asymmetries in grooming or food sharing. A possible explanation for such apparently egalitarian relationships among female vampire bats is the scale of competition. Female vampire bats that are frequent roostmates might not often directly compete for food in the wild.

SUBMITTER: Crisp RJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8261227 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Social bet-hedging in vampire bats.

Project description:Helping kin or nonkin can provide direct fitness benefits, but helping kin also benefits indirect fitness. Why then should organisms invest in cooperative partnerships with nonkin, if kin relationships are available and more beneficial? One explanation is that a kin-limited support network is too small and risky. Even if additional weaker partnerships reduce immediate net cooperative returns, individuals extending cooperation to nonkin can maintain a larger social network which reduces the potential costs associated with losing a primary cooperation partner. Just as financial or evolutionary bet-hedging strategies can reduce risk, investing in quantity of social relationships at the expense of relationship quality ('social bet-hedging') can reduce the risks posed by unpredictable social environments. Here, we provide evidence for social bet-hedging in food-sharing vampire bats. When we experimentally removed a key food-sharing partner, females that previously fed a greater number of unrelated females suffered a smaller reduction in food received. Females that invested in more nonkin bonds did not do better under normal conditions, but they coped better with partner loss. Hence, loss of a key partner revealed the importance of weaker nonkin bonds. Social bet-hedging can have important implications for social network structure by influencing how individuals form relationships.

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Social convergence of gut microbiomes in vampire bats.

Project description:The 'social microbiome' can fundamentally shape the costs and benefits of group-living, but understanding social transmission of microbes in free-living animals is challenging due to confounding effects of kinship and shared environments (e.g. highly associated individuals often share the same spaces, food and water). Here, we report evidence for convergence towards a social microbiome among introduced common vampire bats, Desmodus rotundus, a highly social species in which adults feed only on blood, and engage in both mouth-to-body allogrooming and mouth-to-mouth regurgitated food sharing. Shotgun sequencing of samples from six zoos in the USA, 15 wild-caught bats from a colony in Belize and 31 bats from three colonies in Panama showed that faecal microbiomes were more similar within colonies than between colonies. To assess microbial transmission, we created an experimentally merged group of the Panama bats from the three distant sites by housing these bats together for four months. In this merged colony, we found evidence that dyadic gut microbiome similarity increased with both clustering and oral contact, leading to microbiome convergence among introduced bats. Our findings demonstrate that social interactions shape microbiome similarity even when controlling for past social history, kinship, environment and diet.

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A method for rapid testing of social learning in vampire bats.

Project description:Designing experiments on social learning using an untested behaviour or species requires baseline knowledge of how the animals will perform. We conducted a pilot study of a procedure for rapidly testing social learning in the highly social common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) using a simple maze. To create demonstrators, we allowed captive bats to learn to exit a three-dimensional maze, which reunited them with their colony as a reward. We then filmed naive bats in the same maze, comparing their ability to exit the maze before, during and after the addition of a trained demonstrator. The presence of a demonstrator increased the exit rates of naive bats, presumably by attracting the attention of the naive bats to the maze exit. Four of the five naive bats that exited in the presence of a demonstrator retained the ability to exit without the demonstrator. No naive bat exited during trials without a potential demonstrator present. This experimental procedure appears to be a promising approach for efficient tests of social learning in vampire bats because maze difficulty can be manipulated to adjust learning rates and each trial requires only 15?min.

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Social foraging in vampire bats is predicted by long-term cooperative relationships.

Project description:Stable social bonds in group-living animals can provide greater access to food. A striking example is that female vampire bats often regurgitate blood to socially bonded kin and nonkin that failed in their nightly hunt. Food-sharing relationships form via preferred associations and social grooming within roosts. However, it remains unclear whether these cooperative relationships extend beyond the roost. To evaluate if long-term cooperative relationships in vampire bats play a role in foraging, we tested if foraging encounters measured by proximity sensors could be explained by wild roosting proximity, kinship, or rates of co-feeding, social grooming, and food sharing during 21 months in captivity. We assessed evidence for 6 hypothetical scenarios of social foraging, ranging from individual to collective hunting. We found that closely bonded female vampire bats departed their roost separately, but often reunited far outside the roost. Repeating foraging encounters were predicted by within-roost association and histories of cooperation in captivity, even when accounting for kinship. Foraging bats demonstrated both affiliative and competitive interactions with different social calls linked to each interaction type. We suggest that social foraging could have implications for social evolution if "local" within-roost cooperation and "global" outside-roost competition enhances fitness interdependence between frequent roostmates.

| S-EPMC8460024 | biostudies-literature

Social effects of rabies infection in male vampire bats (<i>Desmodus rotundus</i>).

Project description:Rabies virus (RABV) transmitted by the common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) poses a threat to agricultural development and public health throughout the Neotropics. The ecology and evolution of rabies host-pathogen dynamics are influenced by two infection-induced behavioural changes. RABV-infected hosts often exhibit increased aggression which facilitates transmission, and rabies also leads to reduced activity and paralysis prior to death. Although several studies document rabies-induced behavioural changes in rodents and other dead-end hosts, surprisingly few studies have measured these changes in vampire bats, the key natural reservoir throughout Latin America. Taking advantage of an experiment designed to test an oral rabies vaccine in captive male vampire bats, we quantify for the first time, to our knowledge, how rabies affects allogrooming and aggressive behaviours in this species. Compared to non-rabid vampire bats, rabid individuals reduced their allogrooming prior to death, but we did not detect increases in aggression among bats. To put our results in context, we review what is known and what remains unclear about behavioural changes of rabid vampire bats (resumen en español, electronic supplementary material, S1).

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Ecological metagenomics of vampire bats

Project description:Demographic and environmental drivers of metagenomic viral diversity in vampire bats

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Habituation of common vampire bats to biologgers.

Project description:Rapid advancements in biologging technology have led to unprecedented insights into animal behaviour, but testing the effects of biologgers on tagged animals is necessary for both scientific and ethical reasons. Here, we measured how quickly 13 wild-caught and captively isolated common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) habituated to mock proximity sensors glued to their dorsal fur. To assess habituation, we scored video-recorded behaviours every minute from 18.00 to 06.00 for 3 days, then compared the rates of grooming directed to the sensor tag versus to their own body. During the first hour, the mean tag-grooming rate declined dramatically from 53% of sampled time (95% CI = 36-65%, n = 6) to 16% (8-24%, n = 9), and down to 4% by hour 5 (1-6%, n = 13), while grooming of the bat's own body did not decline. When tags are firmly attached, isolated individual vampire bats mostly habituate within an hour of tag attachment. In two cases, however, tags became loose before falling off causing the bats to dishabituate. For tags glued to fur, behavioural data are likely to be impacted immediately after the tag is attached and when it is loose before it falls off.

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Alternative splicing of the TRPV1 gene underlies infrared sensation in vampire bats

Project description:Vampire bats and snakes have taken thermosensation to the extreme by developing specialized systems for detecting infrared radiation. As such, these creatures provide a window into the molecular and genetic mechanisms underlying evolutionary tuning of thermoreceptors in a species or cell type specific manner. In each case, robust thermal sensitivity likely reflects specialized anatomical features of infrared sensing pit organs, as well as intrinsic heat sensitivity of trigeminal nerve fibers that innervate these structures. Here we show that vampire bats use a molecular strategy involving alternative splicing of the TRPV1 gene to generate a channel specifically within trigeminal ganglia that has a reduced thermal activation threshold. Selective expression of splicing factors in trigeminal, but not dorsal root ganglia, together with unique organization of the vampire bat TRPV1 gene underlies this mechanism of sensory adaptation. Comparative genomic analysis of the TRPV1 locus supports phylogenetic relationships within the proposed Pegasoferae clade of mammals.

2011-08-04 | GSE28243 | GEO

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Enzootic and epizootic rabies associated with vampire bats, peru.

Project description:During the past decade, incidence of human infection with rabies virus (RABV) spread by the common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) increased considerably in South America, especially in remote areas of the Amazon rainforest, where these bats commonly feed on humans. To better understand the epizootiology of rabies associated with vampire bats, we used complete sequences of the nucleoprotein gene to infer phylogenetic relationships among 157 RABV isolates collected from humans, domestic animals, and wildlife, including bats, in Peru during 2002-2007. This analysis revealed distinct geographic structuring that indicates that RABVs spread gradually and involve different vampire bat subpopulations with different transmission cycles. Three putative new RABV lineages were found in 3 non-vampire bat species that may represent new virus reservoirs. Detection of novel RABV variants and accurate identification of reservoir hosts are critically important for the prevention and control of potential virus transmission, especially to humans.

| S-EPMC3810916 | biostudies-literature

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