Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 259

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 55 of the 55 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Social organization and kinship in the polygynous bat Phyllostomus hastatus

Open access
McCracken, Gary F., Bradbury, Jack W.·1981·Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
DOI 10.1007/bf00302840
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Summary1.Social behavior in the bat Phyllostomus hastatus was examined in Trinidad, W.I. over a 26-month period. The studies included (a) long-term observations on marked individuals, (b) the use of allozyme polymorphisms to estimate paternity and the genetic relationships among individuals in social groups, and (c) the investigation of foraging behavior by radio-tracking.2.Day-roosting cave colonies of this bat are subdivided into highly stable, compact clusters of adult females (mean cluster size=17.9±5.1 females) and less stable bachelor groups. Female clusters are always tended by a single adult male and genetic tests demonstrated that these harem males father most or all of the babies born to the females in clusters. Harem males actively defend female clusters from other males in the roost.3.Membership in female clusters is extremely stable and the same individuals roost together for years at a time. Harem male tenure can also be very long and several males retained residence in harems through a minimum of three annual reproductive periods. However, harem male turnovers were also frequently observed and in no instance did a change in males result in disruption of the female roosting cluster. Experimentally disrupted harems reconstituted their original memberships even in the absence of males.4.These stable female clusters are not matrilineal kin groups. Juveniles of both sexes disperse and are not recruited into parental social units. New stable female clusters were formed as cohorts of yearling females drawn from different harems and cave colonies. This was corroborated by independent studies on the age structure of harems. Genetic tests showed that the females comprising any cluster were a genetically random sample of the total adult population.5.Radio-tracking revealed that each individual has its own foraging area that it utilizes throughout the year. The foraging areas of females belonging to the same cluster were adjacent to one another and apparently segregated into larger cluster-specific areas. Females occasionally foraged within the areas of other females in their roosting cluster, but females from different clusters did not forage near one another. Harem males did not defend female foraging areas and in fact foraged in areas well apart from their harem females.6.These compact and stable female roosting clusters are the fundamental unit of P. hastatus' social organization, and apparently they facilitate a male strategy of female-defense polygamy. We hypothesize that these stable clusters arise from active cooperative interactions among females on the foraging grounds. The most likely form of cooperation is the sharing of unpredictable food sources among cluster members. In P. hastatus, such behavior has not evolved through nepotism or processes of group selection that require high group stability. All of our observations and the basic biology of this bat suggest that reciprocity is the most likely means by which the system operates. Mutualism and weak altruism may play secondary roles but cannot be evaluated without additional field study.7.Bachelor groups appear to be much less structured than female clusters, and the possibility of cooperation among bachelors is still open to study.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1007/bf00302840

Cites

55 of 55 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Cited by

See all 259

Metadata

Authors
McCracken, G. F., & Bradbury, J. W.
Venue
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
1981-02
Volume
8
Issue
1
Pages
11-34
ISSN
  • 0340-5443 (ISSN-L)
  • 1432-0762
DOI
10.1007/bf00302840
OpenAlex
W1979469500
Cited by
259
References
55
FWCI
9.24
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.