Fitness benefits of group foraging in closed societies

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Sociality, is widespread in the animal kingdom, and has been in the focus of behavioural ecology research. Nonetheless it is still not well understood from an evolutionary perspective. In recent years, group foraging as a consequence of information transfer has been postulated as one important mechanism involved in sociality. Species feeding on ephemeral resources (i.e. clumped, but unpredictable in time and space) can increase their foraging efficiency by using social information. We found a high proportion of social foraging in the Neotropical insectivorous bat species Molossus molossus. This species, which lives in closed societies and is specialized on ephemeral insect swarms, is an ideal model system through its unique accessibility, to quantify the costs and benefits of group foraging and the consequences for social living.The animals can be repeatedly captured, sampled, and marked in their natural roosts, allowing to manipulate and quantify parameters in the free-ranging animals. Using a misture of established and novel empirical field methods in combination with experimental approaches we want to quantify fitness consequences of group living in M. molossus and simultaneously lay the foundation for a long term research project on the fascinating phenomenon of social foraging and its importance for the evolution of sociality.