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)

"Direct reciprocity" occurs when individuals are more likely to help individuals that helped them previously, while "generalized reciprocity" (also called "upstream reciprocity") occurs when individuals are more likely to help after they have been helped by any individual. So direct reciprocity is like "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" and generalized reciprocity is … Continue reading Generalized reciprocity in vampire bats?

Cooperative behaviors, such as food sharing, can be studied under a spectrum of conditions from completely natural to very artificial. For example, a careful observer in the field can measure the extent to which male chimpanzees will share meat in the wild after a hunt, or an experimenter in the lab can test the extent … Continue reading Vampire bats will feed trapped individuals through a cage wall

New paper available here Key points We re-examined the well-known but controversial case of reciprocal food sharing in vampire bats. What factors predict the decisions of vampire bats to donate food to hungry roost-mates? In collaboration with the Organization for Bat Conservation, we collected a larger sample of food sharing data than ever before under … Continue reading Food sharing in vampire bats: reciprocal help predicts donations more than relatedness or harassment

The poster below was the winner for the University of Maryland Bioscience Day 2012 Poster Competition for the category Biodiversity, Conservation, Ecology & Evolution, and Environmental Science. More importantly, it summarizes the findings in a recent manuscript we submitted. Click to see full size