Social foraging and information transfer

Abstract

Research on social information transfer during foraging has a long tradition, especially in birds. Here, we review the growing body of literature on this subject in bats. Most bat species are gregarious, return to centralized roosts, and produce large amounts of information as a by-product of echolocation. Combined with their large diversity of social systems, this makes them promising candidates for using social information to improve foraging success. The last decades of research into this realm confirm this proposition. Many studies have also emphasized the strong influence of resource distribution on social foraging. A new framework uses these ideas to show that resource ephemerality and predictability influence when, where, and how bats use social information, and that increased value of using social information during particular seasons or life history stages may drive whether they employ opportunistic or coordinated social foraging strategies. The framework can be used to predict social information use based on a finite set of parameters, facilitating future studies to test our understanding of ecological and evolutionary drivers of social foraging and information transfer. New technologies and methods will enable us to push this research in exciting new directions, securing bats as a model taxon for this topic.