School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel.
Department of Migration, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz 78464, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Jul 23;121(30):e2321724121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2321724121. Epub 2024 Jul 15.
Social foraging is very common in the animal kingdom. Numerous studies have documented collective foraging in various species and many reported the attraction of various species to foraging conspecifics. It is nonetheless difficult to quantify the benefits and costs of collective foraging, especially in the wild. We examined the benefits and costs of social foraging using on-board microphones mounted on freely foraging bats. This allowed us to quantify the bats' attacks on prey and to assess their success as a function of conspecific density. We found that the bats spent most of their time foraging at low conspecific densities, during which their attacks were most successful in terms of prey items captured per time unit. Notably, their capture rate dropped when conspecific density became either too high or too low. Our findings thus demonstrate a clear social foraging trade-off in which the presence of a few conspecifics probably improves foraging success, whereas the presence of too many impairs it.
社会觅食在动物王国中非常普遍。许多研究记录了各种物种的集体觅食行为，许多研究报告了各种物种对觅食同种个体的吸引力。然而，要量化集体觅食的好处和成本却很困难，尤其是在野外。我们使用安装在自由觅食蝙蝠上的机载麦克风来研究社会觅食的好处和成本。这使我们能够量化蝙蝠对猎物的攻击，并根据同种个体密度评估它们的成功程度。我们发现，蝙蝠在同种个体密度较低时大部分时间都在觅食，在这段时间内，它们的攻击在单位时间内捕获的猎物数量上最为成功。值得注意的是，当同种个体密度过高或过低时，它们的捕获率会下降。因此，我们的研究结果表明，在社会觅食中存在明显的权衡，即少数同种个体的存在可能会提高觅食成功率，而过多的同种个体则会降低成功率。
