This photo, taken under a bridge in Panama, shows two vampire bats. The bat on the left that looks clean and healthy; the one on the right is covered with bat flies and guano and looks to be having a bad day. Do vampire bats avoid groupmates that seem sick? It probably depends on the disease … Continue reading New paper: When sickness changes a social network, different kinds of social ties respond in different ways
Author: Gerry Carter
I study the behavioral, sensory, and social ecology of vampire bats. http://socialbat.org.
New preprint: Evidence for unfamiliar kin recognition in vampire bats
... by Simon Ripperger, Rachel Page, Frieder Mayer, and Gerry Carter. I would love to get early feedback on this one, so please email me if you have any. We submitted it to Biology Letters. Here's the preprint (what's a preprint?) at BioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.16.874057v1 Common vampire bat (Traer Scott) ABSTRACT: Kin discrimination allows organisms to … Continue reading New preprint: Evidence for unfamiliar kin recognition in vampire bats
Vote for our lab! You can vote every day until Dec 31!
The study from our previous post was selected as one of the 5 competitors for “Coolest Science Story of the Year” at The Ohio State University. LINK: https://news.osu.edu/we-chose-five-of-our-favorites-you-pick-the-winner/ Please vote for us and spread the word! Everyone can actually vote multiple times: every day until Dec 31.
New paper: Vampire bats that cooperate in the lab maintain their social networks in the wild
Here's the paper in Current Biology. The press coverage included PBS, CNN, NPR , BBC, Nature Magazine, Science Magazine, Science News, Popular Science, The Ohio State University, Cosmos Magazine, Wissenschaft, El Mundo, ZME Science, SciShow, and EurekaAlert Press release (video below). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeAiUBM18Cs Take home message: Halloween is a good day to publish a paper on … Continue reading New paper: Vampire bats that cooperate in the lab maintain their social networks in the wild
Latest paper suggests there are two kinds social grooming in vampire bats (and some other updates)
A recent paper from our group (Team Vampire 2017) suggests that vampire bats might perform two different kinds of social grooming. First, a focal vampire bat is more likely to start allogrooming a bat next to them right after grooming themselves. Imagine a cat in your lap that is licking itself and then starts licking … Continue reading Latest paper suggests there are two kinds social grooming in vampire bats (and some other updates)
New Course
I'm also now officially a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Can a captive-born vampire bat feed on a live animal?
In 2016 and 2017, we captured female vampire bats and then released them back into the wild almost two years later to track their wild association networks. During their time in captivity, 12 of the females gave birth to pups. Would these captive-born bats be able to survive in the wild? Jineth Berrío-Martínez conducted an experiment … Continue reading Can a captive-born vampire bat feed on a live animal?
Lab updates: July 2019
At the end of May, Rachelle Adams and I finished teaching the course "Tropical Behavioral Ecology and Evolution" in Panama. Each student worked on an individual research project and also wrote a blog post about another student's project. Tropical Behavioral Ecology and Evolution, May 2019 In June, students Imran Razik, Bridget Brown, and David Girbino … Continue reading Lab updates: July 2019
Lab updates: May 2019
PhD student Imran Razik was awarded both a Short-term Fellowship from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and a Student Research Grant from the Animal Behavior Society. He will be studying urinary oxytocin as a predictor of variation in grooming and food-sharing between both old (familiar) and new (unfamiliar) individuals. MSc student Bridget Brown was awarded … Continue reading Lab updates: May 2019
Proximity sensors, preprints, and grants
Simon Ripperger will be joining our team this summer in Panama. Simon recently published the first paper on his new method for sampling dynamic social networks of whole groups of bats in the field. The paper in Biology Letters is entitled "Proximity sensors on common noctule bats reveal evidence that mothers guide juveniles to roosts … Continue reading Proximity sensors, preprints, and grants
