A fruit bat is in the air. Tel Aviv, Israel, taken at Rothschild Boulevard. Credit: Zoharby
They bring you into this world, shower you with care, and help you build up a mind map of local sites while you're still a flightless pup latched to their nipples.
A new study published in Current Biology on Wednesday sheds light on how mammal parents help their young learn critical life skills, such as flying through the night to find figs, when they are Egyptian fruit bats.
"How animals, humans included, acquire their behavioral skills is a fundamental question," according to a scientist at the University of Tel Aviv who is one of the paper's three authors.
We know that animals do amazing things. We have always wondered how bats learn to navigate dozens of kilometers every night.
There is an energy cost in transporting a pup that can be up to 40 percent of the mother's weight, and the benefits for the offspring are unclear. It was thought that this may be used to facilitate learning in the young.
The tracker is a gps device.
Yovel and his colleagues placed miniature gps trackers on dozens of mother-pup pairs to find out if the offspring were independent.
The co-author said they were able to document a set of distinct patterns.
She explained that the mother and pup fly together and the mother carries the pup during the entire night.
When mothers carry their pups and park them on a tree a few kilometers from their colony, the next phase is called the "drop-off" phase.
The mothers come back to check on their young and help warm them at this point in time.
After eight to 10 weeks, the pups start flying alone to the same drop-off sites during the night and returning to their roost before dawn, though their mothers' work is not done and they continue to check in.
"If you have a teenager at home, you want to make sure he doesn't do stupid things like not coming back to the house at the end of the night," said Goldshtein. When pups fail to fly out on their own, their mothers carry them again.
At 10 weeks, the pups use the drop-off sites as starting points for independent exploration of new fruit trees.
The sites help young people set out and return home.
The team raised some pups without their mothers, and found that they often couldn't find their way back to the cave before the sun set.
The sites help mothers find their kids.
"These trees are like meeting points for lost children in amusement parks," said Yovel.
The drop-off sites serve as secondary roosts and help reduce the pups' exposure to owls.
The 't' word.
One of the craziest parts of the paper was the pup learning when he's upside down. She said it's possible that he's gathering information while being passively transferred.
That suggests the pups' brains have an upright image in mind.
Harten said she was happy to contribute to the scientific gap about how animals help their young learn, particularly among bats, who comprise a fifth of all mammals on Earth.
The team is hesitant to use the word "teaching" in the study because they don't want to offend the scientific community.
Yovel said that it is difficult to prove teaching with animals.
To be careful, we say that they place the pups in a position that allows them to learn.
Current Biology has more information about Mother bats facilitating pup navigation learning. The journal was published in the year 2021.
Current Biology is a journal.
2021.
Mother knows best: How bat moms help pups navigate the world.
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