Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 170, December 2020, Pages 15-26
Animal Behaviour

Geographical variation of social calls and vocal discrimination in male Himalayan leaf-nosed bats

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.10.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examined geographical variation in male Himalayan leaf-nosed bat calls.

  • Male calls showed significant geographical variation across colonies.

  • Neither ecological nor morphological factors nor drift explained the call variation.

  • Males can discriminate between calls of their own colony and those of a foreign colony.

Like birds and many other animals, bats produce diverse acoustic calls for social communication. Geographical variation in social acoustic signals and perceptual discrimination abilities are well studied in birds but largely unexplored in bats. In this study, we recorded male territorial calls of the great Himalayan leaf-nosed bat, Hipposideros armiger, from nine colonies at a large geographical scale and investigated the patterns and causes of geographical variation in acoustic signals. We also performed habituation−dishabituation playbacks to investigate whether males could discriminate between territorial calls of their own versus a foreign colony. Overall, our results showed significant geographical variation in calls across colonies. Neither climatic differences, morphological differences, geographical distances nor genetic distances between colonies explained the observed acoustic variation between colonies. A playback experiment indicated that males from eastern China were able to discriminate between calls of males from their own colony and those of males from a colony in southwestern China. This study provides the first experimental evidence that bats can discriminate geographical variation in social calls.

Section snippets

Field sampling

In April–June of 2015–2016, 90 adult male H. armiger were captured by mist nets from nine caves (10 bats per cave) in southern China, including individuals from Fanchang (FC), Lengshuijiang (LSJ), Chongyi (CY), Hanzhong (HZ), Jiangkou (JK), Anlong (AL), Beichuan (BC), Simao (SM) and Hekou (HK) (Fig. 1). A previous study showed that adult male H. armiger moved between colonies up to 19 km apart. In our study, the minimum and maximum distances between colonies were 270 km and 1978 km, respectively,

Pattern of geographical variation in territorial calls

From the nine sampled colonies, we analysed 900 calls from 90 individuals (10 calls per bat; for details, see Supplementary Table S1). All five call parameters (syllable duration, peak frequency, centre frequency, minimum and maximum frequency) of bats differed significantly between the nine colonies (ANOVA: F8,81 > 3.1, P < 0.005; Table 1). Tukey's multiple-comparison tests indicated that there were significant differences in minimum frequency between the SM and CY colonies, between the SM and AL

Discussion

In this study, the territorial calls of male H. armiger showed significant geographical variation across nine colonies in southern China. Acoustic divergence was not significantly associated with geographical distance, genetic distance, climatic variables or morphological difference. Moreover, we found that all H. armiger males tested displayed pronounced responses after playback stimuli were switched from calls of their own colony to those of allopatric colonies in the

Author Contributions

C.N.S, T.L.J. and J.F. participated in study design and data analysis. C.N.S., H.G.., X.G., C.M.Z., L.X.G. collected the data in the field and laboratory. B.Y.S. assisted with data analysis. C.N.S. drafted the manuscript and T.L.J. revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final version.

Declaration of Interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Acknowledgments

We thank Tong Liu and Aiqing Lin for their assistance with molecular data analysis. We are grateful to Dr Miranda Dyson, Professor Brock Fenton and an anonymous referee for providing helpful comments on the manuscript. We also thank LetPub (www.letpub.com) for its linguistic assistance during the preparation of the manuscript. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 31922050, 31872680, 31670390) and the Fund of the Jilin Province Science and

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