Garg Kritika M, Chattopadhyay Balaji, Ramakrishnan Uma
Ecology and Evolution, National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR, Bellary Road, Bangalore 560065, India.
Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
R Soc Open Sci. 2018 Feb 7;5(2):172024. doi: 10.1098/rsos.172024. eCollection 2018 Feb.
Bats are social animals and display a diverse variety of mating and social systems, with most species exhibiting some form of polygyny. Their social organization is fluid and individuals frequently switch partners and roosting sites. While harem-like social organization is observed in multiple tropical species, its importance is contested in many of them. In this study, we investigated the role of harems in the social organization of the old world fruit bat . Based on regular behavioural observations over a period of 20 months and genetic data from microsatellite markers, we observed that the social organization is flexible, individuals regularly shift between roosts and the social organization resembles a fission-fusion society. Behavioural and genetic analyses suggest that the harems are not strict units of social structure, and the colony does not show signatures of subdivision with harems as behavioural units. We also observed that there was no correlation between individuals with high association index and pairwise relatedness. Our findings indicate that similar to the mating system, the social organization of can also be categorized as a fission-fusion society, and hence the term 'harem' is a misnomer. We conclude that the social system of is flexible, with multi-male multi-female organization, and individuals tend to be loyal to a given area rather than a roost.
蝙蝠是群居动物,表现出多种多样的交配和社会系统,大多数物种呈现出某种形式的一夫多妻制。它们的社会组织具有流动性,个体经常更换伴侣和栖息地点。虽然在多种热带物种中观察到类似后宫的社会组织,但其重要性在其中许多物种中存在争议。在本研究中,我们调查了后宫在旧大陆果蝠社会组织中的作用。基于为期20个月的定期行为观察以及微卫星标记的遗传数据,我们观察到社会组织具有灵活性,个体经常在栖息地之间转移,且社会组织类似于裂变融合社会。行为和遗传分析表明,后宫并非严格的社会结构单位,群体也未显示出以后宫为行为单位的细分特征。我们还观察到,关联指数高的个体与成对相关性之间没有关联。我们的研究结果表明,与交配系统类似,[此处原文缺失具体蝙蝠种类名称]的社会组织也可归类为裂变融合社会,因此“后宫”一词是用词不当。我们得出结论,[此处原文缺失具体蝙蝠种类名称]的社会系统具有灵活性,是多雄多雌组织,个体倾向于忠于特定区域而非栖息地。