Spatial memory obviates following behaviour in an information centre of wild fruit bats

According to the information centre hypothesis (ICH), colonial species use social information in roosts to locate ephemeral resources. Validating the ICH necessitates showing that uninformed individuals follow informed ones to the new resource. However, following behaviour may not be essential when individuals have a good memory of the resources’ locations. For instance, Egyptian fruit bats forage on spatially predictable trees, but some bear fruit at unpredictable times. These circumstances suggest an alternative ICH pathway in which bats learn when fruits emerge from social cues in the roost but then use spatial memory to locate them without following conspecifics. Here, using an unique field manipulation and high-frequency tracking data, we test for this alternative pathway: we introduced bats smeared with the fruit odour of the unpredictably fruiting Ficus sycomorus trees to the roost, when they bore no fruits, and then tracked the movement of conspecifics exposed to the manipulated social cue. As predicted, bats visited the F. sycomorus trees with significantly higher probabilities than during routine foraging trips (of >200 bats). Our results show how the integration of spatial memory and social cues leads to efficient resource tracking and highlight the value of using large movement datasets and field experiments in behavioural ecology. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The spatial–social interface: a theoretical and empirical integration’.