Studying bat pollination in Thailand

My friend Alyssa Stewart studies bat pollination in Thailand. I visited her this December to help* her with one of her dissertation chapters and to do a small study of our own. Alyssa is studying just how good the flower-visiting bats are as pollinators in Thailand. The most common flower-visiting bats there are: Eonycteris spelaea … Continue reading Studying bat pollination in Thailand

Ancestry chart for the vampire bats at Organization for Bat Conservation

Click image for larger view. This is the family tree for vampire bats at Organization for Bat Conservation. This was a bit difficult to construct for a couple of reasons. The math for estimating kinship analyses from genetic markers assumes large wild populations with zero inbreeding (exactly the opposite of what we have here). For … Continue reading Ancestry chart for the vampire bats at Organization for Bat Conservation

What are “prosocial” preferences? (+ news and updates)

Recent news Vampire bat food sharing is more complicated than a strict short-term exchange of a singe commodity. They do not use previous short-term experience as the sole predictor (a literal interpretation of tit-for-tat). Food sharing is based on long-term social bonds which are fairly consistent and robust to experimental perturbations among females (manuscript in … Continue reading What are “prosocial” preferences? (+ news and updates)

You can’t help me or you won’t? What kinds of “cheats” should a food-sharing bat care about?

In response to a talk I gave at the bat meetings, some people saw a problem in the experimental design of my partner choice tests, because I had a condition where a bat can't reciprocate, but not a condition where a bat won't reciprocate. I do know that hungry bats will beg other hungry bats, … Continue reading You can’t help me or you won’t? What kinds of “cheats” should a food-sharing bat care about?

Updates: a conference talk, an outreach talk, and an article (and soon… results)

Did you know that Oct 26--Nov 1 is National Bat Week? October 23. Bat Meetings in Albany, NY. My 15-min talk is "Complex Cooperation: Food Sharing in Vampire Bats is Not Simply “Tit For  Tat” October 30. Public outreach event at the Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas entitled Vampire Bats: The Secret Lives of … Continue reading Updates: a conference talk, an outreach talk, and an article (and soon… results)

Group selection and adaptation in social spiders: an entangled web (y’see what I did there? clever wordplay)

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)

Field Course in Barro Colorado Island

I just spent 2 amazing weeks at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute at Barro Colorado Island, Panama as part of a graduate student course led by Hans-Ulrich Schnitzler, Annette Denzinger, Jerry Wilkinson, and Cindy Moss-- all leading authorities on vocal behavior in bats. I worked with two German students, Diana Shoeppler and Marie Manthey, on … Continue reading Field Course in Barro Colorado Island