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If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. Incorporating novel food sources into their diet is crucial for animals in changing environments.
Although the utilization of novel food sources can be learned individually, learning socially from experienced conspecifics may facilitate this task and enable a transmission of foraging-related innovations across a population. In anthropogenically modified habitats, bats Mammalia: Chiroptera frequently adapt their feeding strategy to novel food sources, and corresponding social learning processes have been experimentally demonstrated in frugivorous and animalivorous species.
However, comparable experiments are lacking for nectarivorous flower-visiting bats, even though their utilization of novel food sources in anthropogenically altered habitats is often observed and even discussed as the reason why bats are able to live in some areas. In the present study, we investigated whether adult flower-visiting bats may benefit from social information when learning about a novel food source.
Our results support this hypothesis and demonstrate flower-visiting bats to be capable of using social information to expand their dietary repertoire. Keywords: Glossophaga soricina , Social transmission, Anthropogenic change, Dietary repertoire, Demonstrator-observer dyad. Incorporating novel food sources into the dietary repertoire is crucial for animals in order to acquire resources in changing environments.
