Foraging flight strategy varies with species identity of co-occurring individuals in bats

Foraging is a key function in the animal kingdom. Foraging in group drives food patch discovery through social information transfer that maximizes an individual’s foraging success through either cooperation or competition in response to congener presence. Understanding how congener presence affects the foraging strategy is especially challenging as it requires close monitoring of animal movements, foraging success, and competitive interactions. The consequences of congener presence on foraging flight strategy of bats, a highly social taxa with strong behavioural plasticity in response to resource ephemerality, remains little tested. Through a three-dimensional acoustic tracking of individual echolocation calls, we assessed to which extent foraging flight strategy of bats varied in response to conspecific and heterospecific presence. We found that flight speed, the main lever for adjusting energy balance during foraging (i.e. slowing down to capture prey and speeding up to find new prey ..., , #### GENERAL INFORMATION

1\. Paper Citation

[https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araf090](https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araf090)

2\. Brief abstract

The presence of individuals from a different species induces a change in bat’s flight strategy, that probably reflects an increase in competitiveness. Indeed, animals communicate and aggregate to optimize foraging success, and are therefore constantly facing a trade-off between access to food and interference from other individuals. To test to which extent an optimal foraging strategy in insectivorous bats varied in the presence of other individuals, we used a 3D acoustic tracking of echolocation calls.

3\. Originators

Kévin Barré

4\. Contact information

Kévin Barré, Station marine de Concarneau, 29900 Concarneau, France. [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

5\. Date of data collection

From September 21st to 30th 2022.

6\. Geographic location(s) of data collection

Rhône Valley in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in France...,