I'm interested in relationships, especially friendship. Why do animals, from humans to vampire bats, establish complex and cooperative social bonds when it seems like we'd gain the most from only helping ourselves and family? Is human friendship simply just an extremely nuanced form of what scientists call "reciprocity"?
This brings me to my REU project and STRI mentor, Gerry Carter. Gerry is an often socially clueless human man who studies social bonds in non-humans (specifically, vampire bats). On a day to day basis, I help Gerry keep our vampire bat colony alive as well as analyze videos of cooperation in vampire bats.
This past weekend, we went to Tolé, which is in Chiriquí, to release the male vampire bats back to their home roost. The roost is in this giant tree in the middle of some random farm field. Apparently some bat aficionado stumbled upon this giant tree in the middle of a farm field, where he found thousands of vampire bats, because hey, there's nothing like stumbling per chance on some random tree in a random field when you want to discover the largest vampire bat roost in Panama!
We drove for 5 hours to this farm field, where we proceeded to get out of the truck, put on rubber boots and headlamps, and slosh through this lovely and deep mixture of cow poop and mud to get to the holy grail of vampire roosts. It was 9pm and dark, so when we stumbled upon the cows, their eyes were creepy and bulging from our headlamps' light. I won't lie: having these creepy night cows run unpredictably back and forth in front of you, muttering cow gurgles, as you make your way to this one tree is surprisingly terrifying. Any-moo, we make our way to the tree with the 15 male vampire bats in a cage and then start releasing them back into the roost. It was bittersweet. Bitter, because the males are petty and endearing creatures, but also because the roost emits this disgusting, bitter ammonia smell caused the large pool of digested-blood-poo that has accumulated from thousands of years of thousands of vampire bats living in the tree. All the males seemed happy to return home to the roost tree, but it's still hard to let him(s) go. (Side note: apparently, sometimes captive bats aren't accepted back to the home roost).
This is bat-unrelated, but the next morning, we woke up bright and early to go to the beach and kayak. I highly recommend any and all of you to go to Las Lajas beach at sunrise. The water is warm, and the sunlight is like liquid gold.
The following blurb of text is about vampire bats and their awesomeness, so if you're bored already and/or think that your organism is, like, way better, you can stop here. You have my permission.
Here's a secret (that I try to shove down other peoples' ears if they'll give me the chance): vampire bats are THE model system for studying cooperation and social bonds. Monkeys are cool and everything, but they're too hard of an animal system to manipulate. And if you can't manipulate a system, how can you test cooperative bonds? Humans exhibit cooperative behaviors, too, but I don't think the IRB would be cool with researchers purposely forcing stable friendships among people and then purposely ruining those friendships to examine the evolutionary design of social cognition.
Cooperative behaviors in vampire bats can be induced and manipulated. I previously mentioned food sharing in vampire bats. Regurgitated food sharing occurs when a vampire fails to feed one night. This is really really bad, because vampires can't store fat energy by consuming blood. Feeding every night is important; if you're a vampire bat and fail to feed one night, you'll have less energy to feed every consecutive night and most likely starve to death. Thus, vampire bats that fail to feed will beg to their roost-mates. And oftentimes, these other vampires will regurgitate blood to feed the begging, starving individual. It's like a momma bird throwing up half-digested-worm to a baby chick, but this is a bunch of adult bats voluntarily throwing up to feed each other. What's more incredible is that previous relationships among bats predict this powerful act of cooperation and reciprocity.
It's not just a bunch of kin feeding each other; it's a bunch of bat friends looking out for each other in times of need.
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| Our Tolé female vampires. They are currently part of an experiment where we're seeing if they'll hang out with the bats that they previously were forced to live with in smaller cages. This would answer questions on how friendships form amongst the bats. |
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| The keys to keeping vampire bats alive: 1) don't let the blood go bad and 2) don't let the blood go bad. |
This past weekend, we went to Tolé, which is in Chiriquí, to release the male vampire bats back to their home roost. The roost is in this giant tree in the middle of some random farm field. Apparently some bat aficionado stumbled upon this giant tree in the middle of a farm field, where he found thousands of vampire bats, because hey, there's nothing like stumbling per chance on some random tree in a random field when you want to discover the largest vampire bat roost in Panama!
We drove for 5 hours to this farm field, where we proceeded to get out of the truck, put on rubber boots and headlamps, and slosh through this lovely and deep mixture of cow poop and mud to get to the holy grail of vampire roosts. It was 9pm and dark, so when we stumbled upon the cows, their eyes were creepy and bulging from our headlamps' light. I won't lie: having these creepy night cows run unpredictably back and forth in front of you, muttering cow gurgles, as you make your way to this one tree is surprisingly terrifying. Any-moo, we make our way to the tree with the 15 male vampire bats in a cage and then start releasing them back into the roost. It was bittersweet. Bitter, because the males are petty and endearing creatures, but also because the roost emits this disgusting, bitter ammonia smell caused the large pool of digested-blood-poo that has accumulated from thousands of years of thousands of vampire bats living in the tree. All the males seemed happy to return home to the roost tree, but it's still hard to let him(s) go. (Side note: apparently, sometimes captive bats aren't accepted back to the home roost).
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| We're smiling for the camera, but our hearts were broken. You can see the triangular roost entrance. |
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| Identifying the cute, fuzzy bat before letting him go off and fulfill his destiny of increasing inclusive fitness. |
This is bat-unrelated, but the next morning, we woke up bright and early to go to the beach and kayak. I highly recommend any and all of you to go to Las Lajas beach at sunrise. The water is warm, and the sunlight is like liquid gold.
 |
| Las Lajas beach, where we went to qualm our sorrows at 6am over letting the beloved male bats go |
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| The sand reminded us that although things can be rough, they can also be good and soft, too |
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| And the continuous ebb and flow of the tides let us know that time is continuous and the bats we love must come and go |
The following blurb of text is about vampire bats and their awesomeness, so if you're bored already and/or think that your organism is, like, way better, you can stop here. You have my permission.
Here's a secret (that I try to shove down other peoples' ears if they'll give me the chance): vampire bats are THE model system for studying cooperation and social bonds. Monkeys are cool and everything, but they're too hard of an animal system to manipulate. And if you can't manipulate a system, how can you test cooperative bonds? Humans exhibit cooperative behaviors, too, but I don't think the IRB would be cool with researchers purposely forcing stable friendships among people and then purposely ruining those friendships to examine the evolutionary design of social cognition.
Cooperative behaviors in vampire bats can be induced and manipulated. I previously mentioned food sharing in vampire bats. Regurgitated food sharing occurs when a vampire fails to feed one night. This is really really bad, because vampires can't store fat energy by consuming blood. Feeding every night is important; if you're a vampire bat and fail to feed one night, you'll have less energy to feed every consecutive night and most likely starve to death. Thus, vampire bats that fail to feed will beg to their roost-mates. And oftentimes, these other vampires will regurgitate blood to feed the begging, starving individual. It's like a momma bird throwing up half-digested-worm to a baby chick, but this is a bunch of adult bats voluntarily throwing up to feed each other. What's more incredible is that previous relationships among bats predict this powerful act of cooperation and reciprocity.
It's not just a bunch of kin feeding each other; it's a bunch of bat friends looking out for each other in times of need.
And here is a reward for all you readers who made it to end of my long long long blog post:
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| Here's a vampire bat giving birth. I like to call these videos Bat Reality TV. |
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