Decision-making and socioemotional vocal behavior in bats

Abstract

Emergent technologies and ecological concerns have expedited studies of the secretive life of bats in ways that were not possible in the recent past. Here we review some of the results of studies on decision-making behavior in bats with respect to foraging, roost selection, and mate choice and show how the economics of decision-making influences some of these choices. Individual bats make choices based upon immediate sensory feedback from their microenvironment as well as social considerations. Many species of bats emit a rich variety of social calls to communicate with conspecifics within large coherent societies that can undergo fission and fusion on a daily as well as long-term basis. These calls are typically associated with the expression of emotional as well as motivational behavior elicited by the activation of specific brain circuits by social calls and other stimuli. Therefore, we include a brief description of the putative neural circuits underlying these behaviors. Within bat colonies, newborn pups babble until they learn to mimic the vocal signature of their mother's call and produce complex phrases with a well-defined syntax. Vocal syntax is also observed in singing, courting, and territorial signaling accompanied by postural displays in some species of bats. Mustached bats also use prosodic variations within a single call type in association with its usage in different behaviors. Together, the findings reported here challenge the notion that bats and other primitive mammalian species express behaviors that are largely innate and reflexive in nature rather than being conscious, insightful, and highly plastic.