Data from: Consistent long-distance foraging flights across years and seasons at colony level in a Neotropical bat

All foraging animals face a trade-off: how much time should they invest in
exploitation of known resources versus exploration to discover new
resources? For group-living central place foragers, this balance is
challenging. Due to the nature of their movement patterns, exploration and
exploitation are often mutually exclusive, while the availability of
social information may discourage individuals from exploring. To examine
these trade-offs, we GPS-tracked groups of greater spear-nosed bats
(Phyllostomus hastatus) from three colonies on Isla Colón, Panamá. During
the dry season, when these omnivores forage on the nectar of unpredictable
balsa flowers, bats consistently travelled long distances to remote,
colony-specific foraging areas, bypassing flowering trees closer to their
roosts. They continued using these areas in the wet season, when feeding
on a diverse, presumably ubiquitous diet, but also visited other,
similarly distant foraging areas. Foraging areas were shared within, but
not always between colonies. Our longitudinal dataset suggests that bats
from each colony invest in long-distance commutes to socially learned
shared foraging areas, bypassing other available food patches. Rather than
exploring nearby resources, these bats exploit colony specific foraging
locations that appear to be culturally transmitted. These results give
insight into how social animals might diverge from optimal foraging.