Carter Gerald, Leffer Lauren
Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2015 Oct 7;10(10):e0138430. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0138430. eCollection 2015.
Evidence for long-term cooperative relationships comes from several social birds and mammals. Vampire bats demonstrate cooperative social bonds, and like primates, they maintain these bonds through social grooming. It is unclear, however, to what extent vampires are special among bats in this regard. We compared social grooming rates of common vampire bats Desmodus rotundus and four other group-living bats, Artibeus jamaicensis, Carollia perspicillata, Eidolon helvum and Rousettus aegyptiacus, under the same captive conditions of fixed association and no ectoparasites. We conducted 13 focal sampling sessions for each combination of sex and species, for a total of 1560 presence/absence observations per species. We observed evidence for social grooming in all species, but social grooming rates were on average 14 times higher in vampire bats than in other species. Self-grooming rates did not differ. Vampire bats spent 3.7% of their awake time social grooming (95% CI = 1.5-6.3%), whereas bats of the other species spent 0.1-0.5% of their awake time social grooming. Together with past data, this result supports the hypothesis that the elevated social grooming rate in the vampire bat is an adaptive trait, linked to their social bonding and unique regurgitated food sharing behavior.
长期合作关系的证据来自几种群居鸟类和哺乳动物。吸血蝙蝠展现出合作性的社会关系，并且像灵长类动物一样，它们通过社交梳理来维持这些关系。然而，在这方面吸血蝙蝠在蝙蝠中究竟有多特殊尚不清楚。我们在固定群居且无体外寄生虫的相同圈养条件下，比较了普通吸血蝙蝠（Desmodus rotundus）与其他四种群居蝙蝠，即 Jamaican fruit-eating bat（Artibeus jamaicensis）、persistent fruit bat（Carollia perspicillata）、 straw-colored fruit bat（Eidolon helvum）和 Egyptian fruit bat（Rousettus aegyptiacus）的社交梳理频率。对于每种性别和物种的组合，我们进行了13次焦点取样，每个物种总共进行了1560次有无社交梳理行为的观察。我们在所有物种中都观察到了社交梳理行为的证据，但吸血蝙蝠的社交梳理频率平均比其他物种高14倍。自我梳理频率没有差异。吸血蝙蝠清醒时间的3.7%用于社交梳理（95%置信区间 = 1.5 - 6.3%），而其他物种的蝙蝠清醒时间的0.1 - 0.5%用于社交梳理。结合过去的数据，这一结果支持了这样的假设，即吸血蝙蝠社交梳理频率的提高是一种适应性特征，与它们的社会关系和独特的反刍食物分享行为有关。
