About
We aim to understand the evolution and regulation of cooperative relationships. I use grooming and food sharing to gain insights into the social lives of vampire bats. My lab starts Fall 2018 at The Ohio State University.
Browse Topics
- About cooperation (52)
- About science as an activity (12)
- About vampire bats (50)
- News (54)
- Other topics (19)
- People (7)
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My TweetsTop Posts & Pages
- Do you hear what I hear? Hearing sensitivity of the common vampire bat
- What animals will a vampire bat feed on? You might be surprised.
- Field notes on weekend trip to Costa Rica (with disc-winged bats!)
- The story of "How I almost died in Trinidad"
- Relatedness and kin discrimination in vampire bats (and a few updates)
- Should we wipe out vampire bats?
- The use of the terms "reciprocity" and "reciprocal altruism" in biology
- New grad student: Bridget Brown
Author Archives: Gerry Carter
English translation of Park (1988) Dominance relationships in a colony of vampire bats. Korean Journal of Zoology.
Rachel Crisp is currently writing her masters thesis on dominance interactions in female vampire bats. Males have a clear dominance hierarchy in competition over roost territories, but do the female vampires have a dominance rank? If so, does it strongly … Continue reading
Posted in About vampire bats
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Updates (July 2017)
New timeline July 30- August 4, 2017: I’ll be at the Behavior 2017 Meeting in Portugal September 3, 2017: Team Vampire wraps up captive experiments and we begin our fieldwork led by Dr. Simon Ripperger. October 15, 2017: I leave Panama. … Continue reading
Posted in About cooperation, News
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Some advice for grad students
With my new lab starting in Fall 2018, I am now interested in prospective graduate students and postdocs. More information on how to apply here. Below are some of my thoughts and advice on applying to graduate schools and being a … Continue reading
Posted in About science as an activity, News
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Team Vampire, Spring 2017
Katharina Eggert is from Germany and visited STRI from March until May 2017. She helped with a broad variety of projects including scoring cooperation in vampire bats, maintaining a system of monitoring bat roosts, and measuring exploration of novel objects … Continue reading
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Should we wipe out vampire bats?
Adam Cole from NPR visited our lab to shoot this great video short on human-vampire bat conflict. So “should we wipe out vampire bats?” No, even if we could, we shouldn’t try, and frankly, nobody is actually suggesting exterminating vampire … Continue reading
Posted in About vampire bats
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Latest paper: social bet-hedging in vampire bats (and two other recent and related studies)
Our latest paper here. Also some early press here. There are actually three recent papers on social networks and the benefits of network size in primates (by Laurent Brent and co-authors), songbirds (by Josh Firth and co-authors), and bats (by me … Continue reading
Posted in About cooperation, About vampire bats, News
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Latest paper: Reproductive seasonality, sex ratio and philopatry in Argentina’s common vampire bats
It can be found here. Summary: 35 years of field observations 13,642 mist-net captures and 181 whole roost captures vampire bats in Argentina (near the southern limit of their range) have a reproductive season (unlike most other places) we have … Continue reading
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