@article {50497, title = {Social calls honestly signal female competitive ability in Asian particoloured bats}, journal = {Animal Behaviour}, volume = {127}, year = {2017}, month = {Jan-05-2017}, pages = {101 - 108}, abstract = {

Why a variety of social animals vocalize during agonistic foraging interactions remains obscure. One possibility is that these signals advertise the signaller\&$\#$39;s competitive ability, playing a role in the defence of food resources, yet there is limited evidence in support of this idea. Here, we used adult female Asian particoloured bats, Vespertilio sinensis, to test whether individual variation in competitive ability when foraging can be explained by social calls. Using synchronized infrared video and audio recording, we monitored bat social vocalizations, dominance rank and weight gain in triads under controlled food conditions. Additionally, subsequent playbacks, consisting of experimental stimuli, echolocation pulses and silence, were presented to feeding bats in a laboratory. Analyses showed that females uttered low-frequency social calls composed of one to five syllable types during feeding competition. The rates of social vocalizations increased with reduced food availability. Interestingly, dominance score and weight gain correlated weakly with body size, but positively with call rate and associated parameters. Playback of social calls inhibited the visits of bats to the focal food dish compared to playback of silence and echolocation pulses. The amount of food consumed was greatly reduced in the presence of experimental stimuli versus controls. Collectively, these results highlight that acoustic signals serve as an honest indicator of bat competitive ability.

}, keywords = {aggressive interaction, bats, competitive ability echolocation, foraging, social call}, issn = {00033472}, doi = {10.1016/j.anbehav.2017.03.012}, url = {http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0003347217300842}, author = {Luo, Bo and Lu, Guanjun and Chen, Kelly and Guo, Dongge and Huang, Xiaobin and Liu, Ying and Feng, Jiang} } @article {50492, title = {The effects of cultural drift on geographic variation in echolocation calls of the Chinese rufous horseshoe bat ( Rhinolophus sinicus)}, journal = {Ethology}, volume = {123}, year = {2017}, month = {Jan-08-2017}, pages = {532 - 541}, abstract = {

Drift, selection, or their combined effects commonly drive geographic variation in traits. Clarifying the relative roles of each process is a long-standing research goal in evolutionary biology. Acoustic signals of bats are a phenotypic characteristic that plays an important role in social organization and species recognition. We extensively sampled the Chinese rufous horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus sinicus) throughout China and Vietnam and reconstructed a species phylogeny to better understand the patterns and causes of the geographic variation of acoustic signals. Our results showed that the resting frequency (RF) of calls varied with latitude, sex, and distance among different colony locations. RF differences were not correlated with genetic distance (based on only one nuclear locus and the mitochondrial locus), climatic factors (mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitable water), or body size, although differences in calls increased with distance among various populations. This suggests that cultural drift may play more important roles than genetic drift and acoustic adaptation in shaping acoustic differences within regions in R. sinicus.

}, keywords = {drift, geographic variation, resting frequency, Rhinolophus sinicus, selection}, doi = {10.1111/eth.2017.123.issue-810.1111/eth.12627}, url = {http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/eth.2017.123.issue-8}, author = {Xie, Lifen and Sun, Keping and Jiang, Tinglei and Liu, Sen and Lu, Guanjun and Jin, Longru and Feng, Jiang} }