Abstract
Once thought to be uniquely human, prosocial behavior has been observed in a number of species, including vampire bats that engage in costly food-sharing. Another social chiropteran, Jamaican fruit bats (Artibeus jamaicensis), have been observed to engage in cooperative mate guarding, and thus might be expected to display prosocial behavior as well. However, frugivory and hematophagy diets may impose different selection pressures on prosocial preferences, given that prosocial preferences may depend upon cognitive abilities selected by different ecological constraints. Thus, we assessed whether Jamaican fruit bats would assist a conspecific in an escape paradigm in which a donor could opt to release a recipient from an enclosure. The test apparatus contained two compartments—one of which was equipped with a sensor that, once triggered, released the trap door of the adjacent compartment. Sixty-six exhaustive pairs of 12 bats were tested, with each bat in each role, twice when the recipient was present and twice when absent. Bats decreased their behavior of releasing the trapdoor in both conditions over time, decreasing the behavior slightly more rapidly in the recipient absent condition. Bats did not release the door more often when recipients were present, regardless of the recipient; thus, there was no clear evidence of prosocial behavior.
Highlights
One of the most enthusiastically studied questions in the field of comparative psychology over the last decade is the question of whether any non-human species share the human tendency to behave prosocially when there is no gain to the self
The purpose of the current study was to examine if Jamaican fruit bats would display evidence of prosocial behavior when presented with a task in which group-mates were confined and separated from the home group
Two repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted to assess whether there was a significant difference in frequency of the bats to release the trap door of compartment B between time blocks and test conditions, and secondly a significant difference in latency of the bats to release the trap door of compartment B between time blocks and test conditions
Summary
One of the most enthusiastically studied questions in the field of comparative psychology over the last decade is the question of whether any non-human species share the human tendency to behave prosocially when there is no gain to the self. Prosocial behavior may be considered altruistic if the assisting individual (hereafter, donor) incurs a cost or receives no additional benefit for assisting the recipient. Prosocial acts toward kin are not considered truly altruistic because assisting kin adds to one’s own reproductive fitness. A famous example of prosocial behavior in non-humans is blood sharing among common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), in which individuals who have fed will regurgitate a portion of their blood meal to feed group-mates who have not fed [2]. In the case of blood sharing, the donor takes on a high cost of losing a portion of the meal that it expended valuable time and energy to obtain, while the recipient did not expend any energy but still receives the benefit of food
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