Why biologists say group selection is wrong, but it's not, but it is... kinda. Whenever I talk about vampire bat food sharing to a public audience, someone will inevitably say something like, "Wow! It's amazing that vampire bats will feed each other to perpetuate their species" or "It's so interesting how vampire bats will act for the good of … Continue reading Group selection and adaptation in social spiders: an entangled web (y’see what I did there? clever wordplay)
Category: About cooperation
Recent and relevant papers– July 23, 2014
Niche-specific cognitive strategies: object memory interferes with spatial memory in the predatory bat, Myotis nattereri (Journal of Experimental Biology)-- Fruit and flower bats tend to use spatial memory over shape because those foods don't move. But insect-eating bats tend to do the opposite, perhaps because insects have distinct shapes and don't stay still. Maternal lineages best explain … Continue reading Recent and relevant papers– July 23, 2014
A few recent updates
Some recent papers: Latest on social bonds in baboons from Seyfarth and Cheney lab Risky Ripples Allow Bats and Frogs to Eavesdrop on a Multisensory Sexual Display A biological market theory approach to plant-fungi mutualism. The past and future of Behavioral Ecology mentions vampire bat food sharing Three-dimensional space: locomotory style explains memory differences in rats … Continue reading A few recent updates
Great talk on food sharing in primates (including humans)
presentation by Adrian Jaeggi at the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture
More on evolutionary psychology and morality
I have been reading work by the evolutionary psychologists Peter Descioli and Robert Kurzban. Kurzban gave a great talk I saw last week at a conference proposing that the reason people have Kantian rule-based systems of morals is because morality serves as a way for bystanders to collectively coordinate which side to join in a conflict. As … Continue reading More on evolutionary psychology and morality
Conference on Evolution of Morality: why do people condemn others?
Last month, I moved my vampire bats to the Organization for Bat Conservation in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. I'm now working on a group of more than 30 bats. I recently attended a small conference on The Evolution of Morality at Oakland University. My favorite talk was by Robert Kurzban on the evolution of third-party punishment … Continue reading Conference on Evolution of Morality: why do people condemn others?
Some recent studies on cooperation
Brood Parasitism and the Evolution of Cooperative Breeding in Birds (Science) Brood parasites (like cuckoos) do best when they lay eggs in the nests of cooperative breeders. But cooperative breeders are better at rejecting brood parasites, because having more eyes and ears at the nest also helps keep out brood parasites. Evolutionary routes to non-kin … Continue reading Some recent studies on cooperation
Manipulating vampire bats’ social relationships: not so easy
In my opinion, reciprocity in vampire bats has not been demonstrated unambiguously. This is because all the evidence to date has really been correlational. My singular obsession recently had been trying to setup and perform the "perfect" reciprocity test in vampire bats. Vampire bats are a good candidate for this kind of experiment because they … Continue reading Manipulating vampire bats’ social relationships: not so easy
Vampire bats regurgitating food to the wrong individual
Bats often roost in absolute darkness and must recognize others through sound and smell. After watching many, many hours of infrared footage of vampire bat food sharing, I've noticed that my vampire bats sometimes appear to make brief mistakes by sharing food with the wrong individual. A typical food sharing sequence starts with the donor … Continue reading Vampire bats regurgitating food to the wrong individual
Relatedness and kin discrimination in vampire bats (and a few updates)
It's crucial for my future experiments to have very precise estimates of relatedness of "my" vampire bats. While working on other things (like scoring videos), I've been slowly adding microsatellite markers to increase the precision of my measures of relatedness. (By the way, one of the best explanations of what relatedness is, can be found here). I … Continue reading Relatedness and kin discrimination in vampire bats (and a few updates)
Carter Lab 