The researcher report that the findings are consistent with the idea that both partner fidelity and partner switching play a role in regulating the bats' relationships.Studying social networks in wild bats at very high resolution hadn&faux fur fabric39;t been possible until now.These tiny sensors, which are lighter than a penny, allowed them to capture social networks of entire social groups of bats and update them every few seconds.The researcher report that the findings are consistent with the idea that both partner fidelity and partner switching play a role in regulating the bats' relationships."Studying animal relationships can be a source of inspiration and insight for understanding the stability of human friendships," added Carter.The researchers found that shared grooming and food sharing among female bats in captivity over 22 months predicted whom they'd interact within the wild.Study says vampire bats keep friends they made in captivity.

For the new study, he wondered whether the same relationships and networks he'd been manipulating in the lab would persist or break down after their release in the wild, where the bats could go anywhere and associate with hundreds of other individuals.Not all relationships survived the transition from the lab back into the wild.

Carter has been studying vampire bat social relationships in captivity since 2010, according to the study published in -- Current Biology."The social relationships in vampire bats that we have been observing in captivity are pretty robust to changes in the social and physical environment -- even when our captive groups consist of a fairly random sample of bats from # a wild colony," said Simon Ripperger of the Museum fur Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science in Berlin.By linking what they knew about the bats' relationships in captivity to what they observed in the wild, they were able to make this leap toward better understanding social bonds in vampire bats.He and study co-lead author Gerald Carter of The Ohio State University said their findings show that repeated social interactions they've observed in the lab aren't just an artefact of captivity. But, similar to human experience, cooperative relationships or friendships among vampire bats appear to result from a combination of social preferences together with external environment influences or circumstances."When we released these bats back into their wild colony, they chose to associate with the same individuals that were their cooperation partners during their time in captivity," added Simon Ripperger.

The vampires bats that spend the most time with each other in captivity are most likely to stick together and form cooperative, friendship-like social relationships after going back to the wilds, suggests a study.While not all relationships survived, the findings suggest that the bonds made in captivity weren't just a byproduct of confinement and limited options. To do it, Simon Ripperger and his colleagues in electrical engineering and computer sciences developed novel proximity sensors."Our finding adds to a growing body of evidence that vampire bats form social bonds that are similar to the friendships we see in some primates," Carter said