A few updates:
- I’m delighted to announce my first three graduate students at Ohio State University: Bridget Brown, Theresa Chen, and Imran Razik. Read more about them here. Theresa and Imran have both won competitive fellowships from the university.
- We published a study showing that younger vampire bats are more exploratory than adults. They are far more likely to check out and interact with novel objects.
- PhD student at UT Austin, Basti Stockmaier, published the first part of his work on the effects of an immune challenge on vampire bat social grooming. In this paper, Basti shows that vampire bats respond with physiological and behavioral responses to LPS (lipopolysaccharide) injections. We observed a decrease in social grooming, even when we forced the bats into close proximity with just one or three others in small independent cages. We are now writing the second part of the study, where we looked at the same effects on grooming and food sharing under less controlled conditions, where the bats are housed all together in a flight cage and proximity between the bats can vary.
- Past intern Julia Vrtilek published her study testing vampire bats escaping from a maze in the presence or absence of demonstrators that already know how to get out. The underlying motivation for this study was trying to think of a simple way to study social learning in vampire bats that did not involve food or require fasting the bats, and where the bats could be tested quickly and repeatedly. In this test, the bats are rewarded not with food but with being reunited with their group.
- We are almost done with data analysis for the main experiments on Panama– on (1) the development of new food-sharing relationships between strangers and (2) tracking the associations of the previously captive bats, after their release into the wild using proximity loggers. More on that soon!
Carter Lab 