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Navigating, Decision-Making and Sociality, Studying Behavior in the Wild from Birth to Adulthood

Description du projet

Surveillance des chauves-souris dans la nature

La chauve-souris frugivore connue sous le nom de roussette de Maurice (Pteropus niger) est le plus grand mammifère endémique de l’île Maurice. Actives au crépuscule et à l’aube, ces chauves-souris sont sociales et se perchent en grands groupes. Elles communiquent entre elles et émettent divers bruits. Pour en savoir plus sur ces chauves-souris, le projet Behavior-Island, financé par le CER, suivra une grande population de chauves-souris de l’île Maurice. Afin d’étudier leur comportement dans la nature, le projet utilisera un nouveau système GPS inversé (ATLAS), permettant de suivre simultanément 1 000 chauves-souris. Comme les chauves-souris ne quittent jamais l’île, il sera possible de suivre les individus de la naissance à l’âge adulte. Les résultats contribueront également à la protection de la chauve-souris de l’île Maurice, qui est en danger et menacée.

Objectif

In the movie the Truman Show, Truman Burbank is astonished when discovering that he spent his entire life in a TV show. Monitoring a humans life is unethical, but many sociologists secretly dream about running such an experiment. Behavior-Island will allow to continuously monitor and manipulate a large population of bats from birth to adulthood. Behavior-Island will be established on Mauritius - the home of P. niger, which is a very interesting bat-model that: (a) lives for decades relying on long-term memory; (b) roosts in large colonies and is highly social; (c) exhibits immense spatio-temporal memory; and (d) is large enough to carry many sensors allowing to track its pups from day one.
Even with current state-of-the-art technologies, studying animal behavior in the wild is highly limited because: (1) it is extremely difficult to monitor the same individual over long periods while also monitoring its environment and (2) it is almost impossible to monitor a substantial part of a population and thus we know little about social interactions. We will overcome these limitations by using a new reverse-GPS system (ATLAS) allowing simultaneous tracking of 1000 bats. Notably, because the bats never leave the island, we will monitor individuals from birth to adulthood. ATLAS also provides locations in real-time, allowing to manipulate specific individuals in the wild and to examine their response. We have already tracked bats with a preliminary ATLAS system on Mauritius.
Combined with an arsenal of additional technologies, ATLAS will allow studying fundamental aspects of behavior in the wild, for the first time, including: Navigation and its ontogeny; Long-term spatio-temporal memory, Decision making and Sociality. We will examine how experience and personality interact to shape behavior, and we will monitor an entire colony, documenting behavior in the population level. Because, P. niger is endangered and threatened, our work will also contribute to its protection

Champ scientifique (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classe les projets avec EuroSciVoc, une taxonomie multilingue des domaines scientifiques, grâce à un processus semi-automatique basé sur des techniques TLN. La classification de ce projet a été validée par l’équipe qui en a la charge.

Régime de financement

ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant

Institution d’accueil

TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY
Contribution nette de l'UE
€ 2 000 000,00

Bénéficiaires (1)