Category: About cooperation

New paper: Modeling the evolution and formation of animal friendship

What is friendship? I have always considered friendship to be a long-term and relatively low-stakes cooperative relationship. The traits that allow people to form friendships can be understood through several theories developed to understand the biological evolution of other cooperative traits; these theories include social evolution theory, game theory, and biological market theory. However many … Continue reading New paper: Modeling the evolution and formation of animal friendship

New paper: “reciprocity versus pseudo-reciprocity” is a false dichotomy

Nature vs nurture. Introverts vs extraverts. Good vs evil. All of these false dichotomies describe cases where a continuous variable that could be imagined as a normal bell curve is instead conceptually divided into two "clean" categories, despite the fact that both factors are almost always present together. This simplification is particularly a problem when … Continue reading New paper: “reciprocity versus pseudo-reciprocity” is a false dichotomy

New paper: “Forced proximity promotes the formation of enduring cooperative relationships in vampire bats”

The latest paper from our lab by Imran Razik, Bridget Brown, and I can be found here at Biology Letters. This plot shows the experimental design. Imran let female vampire bats groom each other (network on left), then randomly selected bats to house together in a small cage for one week (middle), and then let … Continue reading New paper: “Forced proximity promotes the formation of enduring cooperative relationships in vampire bats”

Podcast interview

There are a growing number of bat fanatics around the world! The new podcast "Give Bats a Podcast" interviews people who work in bat research and conservation. It can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc or here: https://linktr.ee/GiveBatsABreak I was featured on the latest episode "Episode 4: "Friends don't let friends die". We talk … Continue reading Podcast interview

New paper on social foraging in vampire bats

Our latest paper entitled "Social foraging in vampire bats is predicted by long-term cooperative relationships" is out in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. This study has so far received press coverage at Science Magazine, CBS, Smithsonian Magazine, Reuters, Daily Mail, Science News, IFLScience, Popular Science, and several others. It was also featured on the Canadian … Continue reading New paper on social foraging in vampire bats

New paper on social rank in female vampire bats

MSc student Rachel Crisp, Laurent Brent, and I published a paper today in Royal Society Open Science, entitled "Social dominance and cooperation in female vampire bats" We did this study because, although I've worked on cooperation in female vampire bats for years, but we had no idea about the role of competition among females. We … Continue reading New paper on social rank in female vampire bats

Adoption in vampire bats

We have a new short note about nonkin adoption in vampire bats published in Royal Society Open Science. I never thought we would write a paper based on a single observation, but we have such interesting longitudinal data leading up to this event. Here's the story: One of the "facts" I often hear about vampire … Continue reading Adoption in vampire bats

New paper: how vampire bats form new food-sharing bonds.

We have a new paper out today in Current Biology and it is featured in the New York Times (pdf), National Geographic, CNN, Scientific American, Discover, Phys.org, Cosmos and I have two radio interviews tomorrow for NPR and BBC. Doing these media interviews has been a pleasant 'distraction' from the coronavirus pandemic which is days … Continue reading New paper: how vampire bats form new food-sharing bonds.

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