Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats

Abstract In many group-living birds and mammals, the formation of affiliative relationships is hypothesized to cause vocal convergence (an increase in call similarity between individuals). However, testing this causal effect can be difficult, because it requires experimentally forming new relationships. Here, we demonstrate convergence in the contact calls of common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) that we introduced and experimentally housed together. To estimate and disentangle the roles of kinship, co-housing (familiarity), allogrooming, and food sharing in predicting call similarity, we first measured call similarity using 35 features of 693,494 contact calls from 95 bats, then fit a series of Bayesian generalized multi-membership models. We also measured changes in call similarity for a subset of individuals that were recorded before and after co-housing. We found that co-housing caused vocal convergence. Furthermore, food-sharing rates among familiar nonkin within the same co-housed group predicted contact call similarity. This finding suggests that the development of cooperative relationships causes further vocal convergence beyond the initial convergence caused by co-housing. Our findings have implications for the development of cooperative relationships and vocal learning. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes We found a bug in the warbleR package code that returns the wrong value for 1 of the 27 call measures that went into our analysis. We reported this to the person maintaining the R package; the package has been updated on Github and a new version should be posted soon. We reran all analyses using the corrected measurement. Although the exact values in methods and results have changed, the results are virtually identical, and none of our conclusions have changed.