Visits at artificial RFID flowers demonstrate that juvenile flower-visiting bats perform foraging flights apart from the
- PDF / 969,223 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 24 Downloads / 128 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Visits at artificial RFID flowers demonstrate that juvenile flower‑visiting bats perform foraging flights apart from their mothers Andreas Rose1 · Marco Tschapka1,2 · Mirjam Knörnschild2,3,4 Received: 18 January 2020 / Accepted: 19 June 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract During the transition from parental care to independent life, the development of adequate foraging skills is a major challenge for many juvenile mammals. However, participating in their parents’ knowledge by applying social learning strategies might facilitate this task. For several mammals, communal foraging of adults and offspring is suggested to be an important mechanism in mediating foraging-related information. For the large mammalian taxon of bats, only little is known about foragingrelated social learning processes during ontogeny. It is often suggested that following their mothers during foraging flights would represent a valuable option for juveniles to socially learn about foraging, e.g., where to find resource-rich foraging patches, but explicit tests are scarce. In the present study, we investigated the foraging behavior of juvenile flower-visiting bats (Glossophaga soricina) in a dry forest in Costa Rica. We tested whether recently volant, but still nursed pups perform foraging flights alone, or whether pups follow their mothers, which would enable pups to socially learn where to feed. For that, we trained mothers and pups to feed from artificial flowers with a RFID reading system and, subsequently, conducted a field experiment to test whether RFID-tagged mothers and pups visit these flowers communally or independently. Unexpectedly, pups often encountered and visited artificial flowers near the day roost, while mothers rarely did, suggesting that they foraged somewhere further away. Our results demonstrate that still nursed juveniles perform foraging flights apart from their mothers and might learn about the spatial distribution of food without participating in their mother’s knowledge, for instance, by following other conspecifics or applying individual learning strategies. An initial potential lack of foraging success in this period is likely compensated by the ongoing maternal provisioning with breast milk and regurgitated nectar during daytime. Our results contribute to the growing body of research on the ontogeny of mammalian foraging behavior in general. Keywords Development of foraging behavior · Chiroptera · Glossophaga soricina · Individual learning · PIT tags Handling editor: Danilo Russo.
Introduction
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42991-020-00048-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Transition from parental care to independent life is a major step in the ontogeny of mammals. During this time, the development of adequate foraging skills might be the most significant challenge, covering learning about “when, where, what and how to eat” (Galef and Giraldeau 2001). However, participating in the
Data Loading...
