Data from: Insectivorous bats integrate social information about species identity, conspecific activity, and prey abundance to estimate cost-benefit ratio of interactions ...

• Main Authors: Lewanzik, Daniel, Sundaramurthy, Arun K., Goerlitz, Holger R.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2019
• Subjects: heterospecific recognition; eavesdropping; biosonar; Myotis capaccinii; heterospecific interaction; Nyctalus leisleri; Pipistrellus pygmaeus; Myotis daubentonii; Pipistrellus pipistrellus; information transfer; Holocene; Chiroptera; Myotis nattereri
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.gp65g2t; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.gp65g2t

Animals can use inadvertent social information to improve fitness‐relevant decisions, for instance about where to forage or with whom to interact. Since bats emit high‐amplitude species‐specific echolocation calls when flying, they provide a constant flow of inadvertent social information to others who can decode that acoustic information. Of particular interest is the rate of feeding buzzes – characteristic call sequences preceding any prey capture – which correlates with insect abundance. Previous studies investigating eavesdropping in bats yielded very different and in part contradictory results likely because they commonly focused on single species only, differed substantially in playback buzz rate, and did usually not account for (baseline) conspecific activity. Our goal was to overcome these limitations and systematically test which inadvertent social information bats integrate when eavesdropping on others and how this integration affects space‐use and both intra‐ and interspecific interactions, ... : All data (bat activity) for Lewanzik et al 2019, J Anim EcolAll data for Lewanzik et al 2019, J Anim Ecol, consisting of bat activity as a function of several predictors in a field playback study. All details are in the article.Lewanzik_etal_2019_JAE_DATA.xlsx ...