Animals living with kin and nonkin should make social decisions based on the consequences for both direct and indirect fitness. Common vampire bats, Desmodus rotundus, invest in stable cooperative relationships that benefit ...

Many birds and mammals produce distress calls when captured. Bats often approach speakers playing conspecific distress calls, which has led to the hypothesis that bat distress calls promote cooperative mobbing. An alternative ...

Many animals use social cues to find refuges. Bats can find roosts using the echolocation and social calls of conspecifics, but they might also use scent cues, a possibility which is less studied. The entrances of bat ...

Blood-feeding (sanguivory) has evolved more than two dozen times among birds, fishes, insects, arachnids, molluscs, crustaceans, and annelids; however, among mammals, it is restricted to the vampire bats. Here, the authors ...

Social structure can emerge from hierarchically embedded scales of movement , where movement at one scale is constrained within a larger scale (e.g. among branches, trees, forests). In most studies of animal social networks, ...

Vocalizations are an important means to facilitate social interactions, but vocal communication may be affected by infections. While such effects have been shown for mate-attraction calls, other vocalizations that facilitate ...

Individual animals across many different species occasionally 'adopt' unrelated, orphaned offspring. Although adoption may be best explained as a by-product of adaptive traits that enhance parental care or promote the ...

Permutation tests are widely used to test null hypotheses with animal social network data, but suffer from high rates of type I and II error when the permutations do not properly simulate the intended null hypothesis. Two ...