Data from: 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 patches), is
no longer used in presence of intra-guild heterospecifics. Also, the
overall foraging level** increased regardless of co-occurring species,
through a facilitation and/or a higher prey availability. The study shows
that bats integrate species identity in making decisions about their
foraging flight strategy, with a stronger tolerance towards conspecifics
with which social relations are most important, e.g. because they share
the same roost. This might have important implications in understanding
consequences of interactions, especially in relation to anthropogenic
pressures that rearrange bat communities and their prey in time and space,
which could exacerbate natural competition.