Rachel Page and Mike Ryan, studying fringe-lipped bats at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, found that nave bats quickly learned to associate a new frog call with edible prey by observing their neighbor eating, even when the call comes from a frog they wouldn't normally eat.
Page, a graduate student in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, and Ryan, the Clark Hubbs Regents Professor in Zoology, report their findings in the June 20 issue of Current Biology.
This is the first study to show predators learning socially through acoustic, rather than visual or olfactory, prey cues.
"It is stunning that these bats show such rapid changes in their responses to prey cues, to the extent that they will respond to a stimulus that they should be under strong selective pressure to avoid in the wild," said Page. "This result is very unexpected and shows an extreme degree of flexibility."
Through the bats' ability to learn socially, the new connection between a frog call and the presence of food can quickly spread through the tight-knit bat colony.
To observe the cultural transmission of this new information in the bats, Page and Ryan captured wild fringe-lipped bats and tested them in large outdoor flight cages. They played the calls of large, poisonous cane toads through speakers and gave the bats that approached the speaker a reward of raw fish. Once a bat learned to associate the cane toad call with food, they became "tutor" bats.
Nave bats were then allowed to observe the tutor bats. The nave bats, on average, learned to associate the new frog call with food after observing their tutor five time
'"/>
Contact: Rachel Page
rachelpage@mail.utexas.edu
507-212-8503
University of Texas at Austin
19-Jun-2006