The Bats
Photo by Brock Fenton
Decision-making strategies in frog-eating bats
For my PhD, I explored learning and decision-making strategies underlying foraging behavior in wild bats in Panama. My dissertation investigated economic rationality in frog-eating bats (Trachops cirrhosus) by varying the context of their foraging decisions, energetic state, and the amount of information available. My previous work has shown that in some contexts, frog-eating bats perform quite well at decision-making tasks that we humans routinely fail at. When we manipulated several aspects of the frog calls bats choose from, we found that bats largely make rational decisions. Additionally, these bats make rapid decisions regardless of the number of options or the complexity of the choice. In other contexts, we have observed common decision-making errors, similar to those that we humans and other animals are prone to, targeting larger frog choruses when both choruses are small but no longer distinguishing between larger choruses.
How do new behaviors spread?
Our lab investigates how and why novel foraging behaviors develop, spread, and persist within social populations. We focus on the role of social learning in shaping how individuals acquire and maintain new foraging strategies, asking what information animals use (e.g., acoustic, visual, or olfactory), who learns from whom, where and how learning occurs, and why some populations adopt new behaviors while others do not. Using social species such as the Jamaican fruit bat, we combine mechanistic studies of information transmission with large-scale tracking to examine how individual, social, ecological, and seasonal factors shape behavioral innovation and resource use. Ultimately, we aim to understand how social learning facilitates behavioral flexibility and may buffer populations against environmental change. Our lab is investigating the spread of novel foraging behaviors within populations.
How do bats choose among food resources?
Foraging animals must balance many aspects of a resource at once: its quality, quantity, accessibility, and the costs of obtaining it. We study how Jamaican fruit bats (Artibeus jamaicensis) evaluate these tradeoffs when choosing food. Unlike many fruit-eating animals, these bats often carry fruit away from the tree to feeding roosts, meaning that larger or more valuable food items also come with greater transportation costs. Our experiments ask how bats integrate these competing factors when evaluating resources. We are particularly interested in how bats use information about both the size and number of available food items and how these different dimensions of resource quality influence their decisions.
Photo by Gregg Cohen
From Hemingway et al. (2020): The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Paradox of the Generalist Predators
