Fitness benefits of group foraging in closed societies

社会性，广泛存在于动物界，一直是行为生态学研究的焦点。尽管如此，从进化论的角度来看，它仍然没有得到很好的理解。近年来，群体觅食作为信息传递的结果被认为是一种重要的社会性机制。以短暂资源(即聚集的，但在时间和空间上不可预测的)为食的物种可以利用社会信息提高它们的觅食效率。我们发现，在新热带食虫蝙蝠物种Molossus molossus中，社会觅食的比例很高。这种物种生活在封闭的社会中，专门研究短暂的昆虫群，通过其独特的可访问性，是一个理想的模型系统，可以量化群体觅食的成本和收益以及对社会生活的影响。动物可以在它们的自然栖息地反复捕获、采样和标记，从而允许操纵和量化自由放养动物的参数。利用已有的和新颖的经验场方法，结合实验方法，我们想要量化食火鱼群体生活的健康后果，同时为一个关于社交觅食这一迷人现象及其对社会性进化的重要性的长期研究项目奠定基础。

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.