Like college roommates, vampire bats bond when randomly paired

A study on vampire bats suggests that social bonding between college roommates is a human phenomenon.

Vampire bat pairs that were forced to live together for a single week were released into a bigger bat community and were able to maintain their friendly relationships for more than two months.

The study provides rare findings about wild animal social behavior that are based on precisely measured effects of relationship manipulation.

The process of how social bonds form is a mystery to a lot of people, but they have different interpretations of how it happens.

We are trying to build vampire bats as a way to test the interpretations. We measured their grooming rates after forcing them together for a short period of time. It has not been done before.

Two graduate students from Ohio State helped conduct the study, with the help of the researcher. The study took place at the Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

The journal Biology Letters published the research.

The team captured seven adult female vampire bats from each of three distantly located roosts to assemble a colony of 21 bats for the study.

For the first six weeks, the vampire bats were free to mingle among their roost mates and strangers from other roosts. Researchers split the bats into seven smaller groups during the treatment phase. Each group was given one bat from each of the three sites and forced to live together as a trio for seven days.

Pairs of bats that lived together were identified as test pairs whose grooming behavior was compared to two other types of pairs that were not forced into proximity, and familiar pairs of bats that were caught from the same roost.

The bats were free to live together again for nine weeks after the treatment period.

During the three study phases, Razik observed and measured all bat grooming interactions of 5 seconds or longer that were captured by three cameras operating for six hours a day.

They had the potential to start grooming relationships and then we did the forced proximity phase to see if we could increase the rates of grooming in random pairs. We measured grooming during the post-treatment phase to compare pre- and post-treatment grooming.

The results showed that the forced proximity phase increased social grooming in test pairs more than in control and familiar pairs.

Carter said it was a striking pattern and that bats stay together for a little while after they are in a college dorm room. At the end of the experiment, the test bats were grooming each other more than the control bats.

The team focused their analysis on the effect of the randomly assigned forced proximity treatment on lasting social bonds, despite the fact that many of the new test pairs had done some grooming in the first six weeks.

During the forced proximity phase, each bat had two partners with whom they could interact, and in the post-treatment phase, they had at least 20 other available partners.

The study doesn't answer the question of how social bonds form in the wild, which is important for animal health, well-being, survival and reproductive success. There is a debate on the relative importance of potential causality factors, such as whether animals are drawn to others with similar characteristics or not. Is living close to each other enough to form bonds or is it more like that?

The college dorm room is a perfect example of a causality between being forced into the same space and having a preference for someone later. A relationship was formed. It might be obvious for humans, but we don't know how much this is happening in other animals.

More information: Forced proximity promotes the formation of enduring cooperative relationships in vampire bats, Biology Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2022.0056. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi … .1098/rsbl.2022.0056 Journal information: Biology Letters Citation: Like college roommates, vampire bats bond when randomly paired (2022, April 5) retrieved 6 April 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-04-college-roommates-vampire-bond-randomly.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.