Postweaning maternal food provisioning in a bat with a complex hunting strategy

Adult animals of many taxa exhibit extended parental care by transferring food to inexperienced offspring, thus allocating nutritional and sometimes even informational benefits such as the acquisition of adult dietary preferences and foraging skills. In bats, postweaning food provisioning is severely understudied, despite the taxonʹs diverse and complex foraging strategies. The Neotropical common big-eared bat, Micronycteris microtis, preys on relatively large insects gleaned from vegetation, finding its silent and motionless prey by echolocation. The demands of this cognitively challenging hunting strategy make M. microtis a likely candidate for maternal postweaning food provisioning. We studied five free-living mother–pup pairs in their night roost using infrared video recordings. Each mother exclusively fed her own pup and mother–pup recognition was mutual. Provisioned pups were volant and had started their own hunting attempts. Weaned pups were provisioned for 5 subsequent months with a variety of insects, reflecting the adult diet. Mothers transferred over 50% of their prey to pups. Maternal prey transfers declined as pups matured, whereas the pupsʹ own prey captures increased. During prey transfers, aggressive behaviour between mothers and pups was rare. We argue that postweaning maternal food provisioning might yield two informational benefits for M. microtis pups. First, learning how to handle large and well-defended prey is mandatory for inexperienced pups and could be practised with prey items provided by their mothers. Second, acoustically characteristic echo images of prey items could be gained during mother–pup prey transfers, probably facilitating the successful acquisition of M. microtisʹs complex hunting strategy.