School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel.
School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel; Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Berlin 14193, Germany.
Curr Biol. 2022 Jan 24;32(2):350-360.e4. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.11.010. Epub 2021 Nov 24.
Learning where to forage and how to navigate to foraging sites are among the most essential skills that infants must acquire. How they do so is poorly understood. Numerous bat species carry their young in flight while foraging. This behavior is costly, and the benefits for the offspring are not fully clear. Using GPS tracking of both mothers and bat pups, we documented the pups' ontogeny from being non-volant to foraging independently. Our results suggest that mothers facilitate learning of navigation, assisting their pups with future foraging, by repeatedly placing them on specific trees and by behaving in a manner that seemed to encourage learning. Once independent, pups first flew alone to the same sites that they were carried to by their mothers, following similar routes used by their mothers, after which they began exploring new sites. Notably, in our observations, pups never independently followed their mothers in flight but were always carried by them, suggesting that learning occurred while passively being transported upside down.
学习去哪里觅食以及如何找到觅食地点是婴儿必须掌握的最重要的技能之一。它们是如何做到的还不太清楚。许多蝙蝠物种在飞行中携带幼崽觅食。这种行为代价高昂，对后代的好处还不完全清楚。通过对母蝙蝠和蝙蝠幼崽的 GPS 追踪，我们记录了幼崽从不飞行到独立觅食的发育过程。我们的研究结果表明，母亲通过反复将幼崽放在特定的树上，并以似乎鼓励学习的方式行为，来帮助它们未来的觅食，从而促进幼崽的学习。一旦独立，幼崽首先独自飞往与母亲带它们去的相同地点，沿着与母亲相同的路线飞行，然后开始探索新的地点。值得注意的是，在我们的观察中，幼崽从未独立跟随母亲飞行，而是一直被母亲携带，这表明学习是在被动运输的情况下发生的。
