Abstract

Centurio senex is an iconic bat characterized by a facial morphology deviating far from all other New World Leaf Nosed Bats (Phyllostomidae). The species has a bizarrely wrinkled face and lacks the characteristic nose leaf. Throughout its distribution from Mexico to Northern South America the species is most of the time rarely captured and only scarce information on its behavior and natural history is available. Centurio senex is frugivorous and one of the few bats documented to consume also hard seeds. Interestingly, the species shows a distinct sexual dimorphism: Adult males have more pronounced facial wrinkles than females and a fold of skin under the chin that can be raised in style of a face mask. We report the first observations on echolocation and mating behavior of Centurio senex, including synchronized audio and video recordings from an aggregation of males in Costa Rica. Over a period of 6 weeks we located a total of 53 perches, where during the first half of the night males were hanging with raised facial masks at a mean height of 2.35 m. Most of the time, the males moved just their wing tips, and spontaneously vocalized in the ultrasound range. Approaches of other individuals resulted in the perching male beating its wings and emitting a very loud, low frequency whistling call. Following such an encounter we recorded a copulation event. The observed aggregation of adult C. senex males is consistent with lek courtship, a behavior described from only few other bat species.

Highlights

  • Mating systems of bats remain a rather poorly understood topic

  • The lack of harmonics is not explained by the facial mask of the perched males, as the echolocation calls of masked perched bats did not differ significantly from those of flying individuals, when Centurio senex males usually did not wear the mask

  • Our study summarizes the first behavioral data from a lek of Centurio senex males, observed over a period of almost 6 weeks at a Costa Rican highland forest site

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Summary

Introduction

Mating systems of bats remain a rather poorly understood topic. A review of McCracken and Wilkinson [1] presented information for only 6.9% of the bat species described at that time (963 spp). This percentage probably has not increased at the same rate as the number of described bats, which currently is at 1406 species

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