title: From resource to female defence: the impact of roosting ecology on a bat's mating strategy.
abstract: With their extraordinary species richness and diversity in ecological traits and social systems, bats are a promising taxon for testing socio-ecological hypotheses in order to get new insights into the evolution of animal social systems. Regarding its roosting habits, proboscis bats form an extreme by occupying sites which are usually completely exposed to daylight (e.g. tree trunks, vines or rocks). This is accompanied by morphological and behavioural adaptations to remain cryptic in exposed day roosts. With long-term behavioural observations and genetic parentage analyses of individually marked proboscis bats, we assessed its social dispersion and male mating strategy during day and night. Our results reveal nocturnal male territoriality-a strategy which most closely resembles a resource-defence polygyny that is frequent also in other tropical bats. Its contrasting clumped social dispersion during the day is likely to be the result of strong selection for crypsis in exposed roosts and is accompanied by direct female defence in addition to male territoriality. To the best of our knowledge, such contrasting male mating strategies within a single day-night cycle have not been described in a vertebrate species so far and illustrate a possible evolutionary trajectory from resource-defence to female-defence strategy by small ecologically driven evolutionary steps.
authors.affiliation: Museum für Naturkunde , Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity , Invalidenstrasse 43, 10115 Berlin , Germany.
authors.forename: Linus
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-9181-4621
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Günther
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences , The University of Melbourne , Werribee, Victoria , Australia.
authors.forename: Marlena D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Lopez
authors.affiliation: Free University Berlin, Institute of Biology, Animal Behavior Lab, Takustrasse 6, 14195 Berlin, Germany; Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Roosevelt Avenida, Tupper Building 401, Balboa, Panama.
authors.forename: Mirjam
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Knörnschild
authors.affiliation: University of Illinois , Department of Biological Science, Chicago, IL , USA.
authors.forename: Kyle
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Reid
authors.affiliation: Department of Sensor Technology , Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg , Paul-Gordan-Strasse 3/5, 91052 Erlangen , Germany.
authors.forename: Martina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nagy
authors.affiliation: Museum für Naturkunde , Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity , Invalidenstrasse 43, 10115 Berlin , Germany.
authors.forename: Frieder
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Mayer
keywords: Rhynchonycteris naso; female-defence polygyny; male territoriality; resource-defence polygyny; site-dependent dominance; social dispersion