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.2020 Nov 11;15(11):e0241063.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0241063. eCollection 2020.

The masked seducers: Lek courtship behavior in the wrinkle-faced bat Centurio senex (Phyllostomidae)

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The masked seducers: Lek courtship behavior in the wrinkle-faced bat Centurio senex (Phyllostomidae)

Bernal Rodríguez-Herrera et al. PLoS One..

Abstract

Centurio senex is an iconic bat characterized by a facial morphology deviating far from all other New World Leaf Nosed Bats (Phyllostomidae). The species has a bizarrely wrinkled face and lacks the characteristic nose leaf. Throughout its distribution from Mexico to Northern South America the species is most of the time rarely captured and only scarce information on its behavior and natural history is available. Centurio senex is frugivorous and one of the few bats documented to consume also hard seeds. Interestingly, the species shows a distinct sexual dimorphism: Adult males have more pronounced facial wrinkles than females and a fold of skin under the chin that can be raised in style of a face mask. We report the first observations on echolocation and mating behavior of Centurio senex, including synchronized audio and video recordings from an aggregation of males in Costa Rica. Over a period of 6 weeks we located a total of 53 perches, where during the first half of the night males were hanging with raised facial masks at a mean height of 2.35 m. Most of the time, the males moved just their wing tips, and spontaneously vocalized in the ultrasound range. Approaches of other individuals resulted in the perching male beating its wings and emitting a very loud, low frequency whistling call. Following such an encounter we recorded a copulation event. The observed aggregation of adult C. senex males is consistent with lek courtship, a behavior described from only few other bat species.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The owner of the study site, Hotel Villa Blanca, provided support in the form of salaries for authors J.V. and E.H. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Phenology of aCenturio senex male aggregation.
a) Maximum number of perches occupied by maleC.senex per night over the entire sampling period. The bats were first observed on September 15th, 2018. b) Development of the number of perching males over the night. Black dots refer to the first half of the study period until October 10th, 2018, white dots refer to the second half.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Example of a typical courtship song ofCenturio senex.
The four major elements are indicated by color bars: echolocation sequences (ES, green bars), trill calls (TC, yellow bars), wing beat sequences (WBS, pink bar), whistle sequence (WS, red bar. Note harmonic artefacts caused by the inevitably overloaded recording of this always relatively loud element.). The repetition of echolocation and trill sequences resulted in this example in an 8 element song. (Parameters for all spectrograms: Blackman Window, FFT 512, frame size 100%, overlap 75%, resulting in a spectral resolution of 977 Hz and a temporal resolution of 0.256 ms).
Fig 3
Fig 3. Song elements.
A complete courtship song is composed of at least four elements: A) echolocation sequence, B) trill call, C) wing beat sequence, D) whistle sequence (Note harmonic artefacts caused by the overloaded recording of this relatively loud element).
Fig 4
Fig 4. Syllables in the vocal repertoire ofCenturio senex: Echolocation Call (EC), trill (TS), Wing Beat (WB) and associated Wing Beat Call (WBC), high frequency call (HF), downward modulated call (DM), Whistle Call (WC) and an end sweep (E).
Fig 5
Fig 5
Field photographs a)Centurio senex male with raised facial mask; b) male with lowered facial mask; c) perching male being approached by another individual; d) detail of same perching male during the approach, just before emitting a whistle sequence.
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The owner of the study site, Hotel Villa Blanca, provided support in the form of salaries for authors J.V. and E.H., but did not have any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are defined in the ‘author contributions’ section. The authors also want to acknowledge the long-standing cooperation between UCR and UULM, which is supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). GG was funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. MT acknowledges the financial support of the University of Ulm.

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