Why vampire bats network

Here are slides from the longer version (about 2x as long) of the talk I gave at the annual meeting of the North American Society for Bat Research. There was a contest at the conference for shortest title, hence the 3-word title.

Slide01
Date: October 31, 2015

Slide02Slide03

Slide04
a lot of empirical work and theory on parental care and parent-offspring conflict.
Slide05
pair bonds in voles: one of the great biology success stories
Slide06
animal analogs of human friendships.
Slide07
friendships have interesting traits

Slide08

Slide09
Vampire bats are outliers for brain and neocortex size.
Slide10
A fed bat gets a large meal, but bats often miss meals & can starve after missing 2+ meals.

Slide11Slide12Slide13Slide14

Slide15
video showing self grooming and social grooming.

Slide16

Slide17
5 group-living bats are housed at OBC in Michigan. None have ectoparasites.
Slide18
Self-grooming rates did not differ.
Slide19
Social grooming rates did.
Slide20
Vampires socially groom more than other bats.
Slide21
photo source: https://www.touristmaker.com/gambia/

Slide22Slide23Slide24Slide25Slide26Slide27Slide28Slide29Slide30Slide31Slide32Slide33Slide35Slide34

Slide36
This is what we predict.
Slide37
This is what we found.

Slide38

Slide39
Not the result of fishing for correlations.
Slide40
Vampires don’t put all their cooperative investments (eggs) in one partner (basket).
Slide41
It is becoming increasingly clear that cooperation is best understood in context of networks not dyads
Slide42
Thank you to my supporters.
Slide43
Email me if you are interested in working with us.

One thought on “Why vampire bats network

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s