"One of the craziest parts of the paper was the pup actually learns when he's attached upside down," said co-author Lee Harten.
The drop-off sites also serve as secondary roosts, and having many of them helps reduce the pups' exposure to predators such as owls. "These trees are a bit like meeting points for lost-children in amusement parks," said Yovel. In addition, the sites help mothers find wayward young. In essence, the sites serve as navigational aids that help the young set out and return home.Īs a control, the team raised some pups without their mothers and found they often could not find their way back to their cave before sunrise. Or, when pups fail to fly out alone, their mums carry them again.įinally, at 10 weeks and beyond, the pups use the drop-off sites as starting points for independent exploration of new fruit trees. "Imagine you have a teenager at home – he's already kind of independent, but you also want to monitor he's not doing something stupid like not coming back to the house at the end of the night," said Goldshtein. Next comes the "drop-off" phase when mothers carry their pups and park them on a tree a few kilometers (miles) from their colony.Īt this stage, three to 10 weeks in, the mothers continuously return from foraging to check on their young, feeding them and helping warm them.Īfter that, at eight to 10 weeks, the pups start flying alone to the same drop-off sites during the night and returning to their roost before dawn – though their mothers' work is not quite done, and they continue to check in. "At the beginning, the mother and pup are constantly attached, they fly together and the mother carries the pup during the entire night," she explained – weeks one to three of the young mammal's life. To find out for sure, Yovel and his colleagues placed miniaturized GPS trackers on dozens of mother-pup pairs, as the offspring passed from dependence to independence.Ĭo-author Aya Goldshtein said they were able to document a set of distinct patterns. It was hypothesized – but never proven – this may be to facilitate learning in the young.
Many bat species carry their young in flight, but there is an energy cost in transporting a pup that can be up to 40% of the mother's own weight, and the benefits for the offspring were unclear. Bats for instance navigate dozens of kilometers every night to forage, and we have always wondered how they learn to do so." "How animals, humans included, acquire their behavioral skills is a fundamental question," Yossi Yovel, a scientist at the University of Tel Aviv and one of the paper's three authors told Agence France-Presse (AFP). That may not be true for humans but it certainly is in the case of bat mothers and their flightless pups latched to their nipples.Ī new study published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Current Biology on Wednesday by Israeli researchers sheds light on how mammal parents help their young learn critical life skills – in this case, Egyptian fruit bats, as they soar through the night evading predators and finding figs. They give birth, care with deep love, and occasionally maybe even help little ones construct a mind map of local foraging sites.
No matter which species of mammals one looks at, one thing is certain: Mothers are life's most important teachers.
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