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