Friends help female vampire bats cope with loss

Female vampire bats are'consoled' by unrelated friends when a family member goes missing, new research has revealed. Despite their malevolent reputation, female vampire bats form strong social bonds with their mothers and daughters as they groom and share regurgitated meals of blood. They also form friendships with less closely related bats and researchers discovered that unrelated friends are an important source of support when family members go missing. Researchers have found that when major food donors, like mothers or daughters, were removed from a bat's social network, females who previously built up more friendships with non-relatives coped better with their loss. Researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City monitored social interactions in a captive colony of around 30 marked common vampire bats for four years.