ArticleScience advances2018
Persistent producer-scrounger relationships in bats.
Article in Science advances, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Helper-exploiter polymorphism with ecological inheritance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Personality Traits and Producer Behavior: The Influence of Individual Differences in Human Social Foraging.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Dinner Date: Opposite-Sex Pairs of Fruit Bats (Biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Complex competition interactions between Egyptian fruit bats and black rats in the real world.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Staying Alive: Individual Behavioral Variation Influences Survival, but Not Reproductive Success, in Female Group-Living Ground Squirrels.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Spatial memory obviates following behaviour in an information centre of wild fruit bats.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Group vocal composition and decision-making during roost finding in Spix's disk-winged bats.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Visual social information use in collective foraging.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Abundant resources can trigger reduced consumption: Unveiling the paradox of excessive scrounging.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- What you have, not who you know: food-enhanced social capital and changes in social behavioural relationships in a non-human primate.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Guides and cheats: producer-scrounger dynamics in the human-honeyguide mutualism.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Skill trade-offs promote persistent individual differences and specialized tactics.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- To produce or not to produce? Contrasting the effect of substance abuse in social decision-making situations.Heliyon · 2023Article
- Food-caching chickadees with specialized spatial cognition do not use scrounging as a stable strategy when learning a spatial task.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Bats experience age-related hearing loss (presbycusis).Life science alliance · 2023Article
- Re-examining extreme sleep duration in bats: implications for sleep phylogeny, ecology, and function.Sleep · 2022Article
- Behavioural specialization and learning in social networks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Body-size dependent foraging strategies in the Christmas Island flying-fox: implications for seed and pollen dispersal within a threatened island ecosystem.Movement ecology · 2022Article
- A unifying mechanism governing inter-brain neural relationship during social interactions.eLife · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Social foraging theory suggests that group-living animals gain from persistent social bonds, which lead to increased tolerance in competitive foraging and information sharing. Bats are among the most social mammals, often living in colonies of tens to thousands of individuals for dozens of years, yet little is known about their social foraging dynamics. We observed three captive bat colonies for over a year, quantifying >13,000 social foraging interactions. We found that individuals consistently used one of two foraging strategies, either producing (collecting) food themselves or scrounging it directly from the mouth of other individuals. Individual foraging types were consistent over at least 16 months except during the lactation period when females shifted toward producing. Scroungers intentionally selected whom to interact with when socially foraging, thus generating persistent nonrandom social relationships with two to three specific producers. These persistent producer-scrounger relationships seem to reduce aggression over time. Finally, scrounging was highly correlated with vigilance, and we hypothesize that vigilant-prone individuals turn to scrounging in the wild to mitigate the risk of landing on a potentially unsafe fruit tree. We find the bat colony to be a rich and dynamic social system, which can serve as a model to study the role that social foraging plays in the evolution of mammalian sociality. Our results highlight the importance of considering individual tendencies when exploring social behavior patterns of group-living animals. These tendencies further emphasize the necessity of studying social networks over time.
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