Wildlife: Female vampire bats hang out and 'chat' to their friends about food

A new study claims that bats meet up when hunting for food and act like friends!

Female vampire bats like to meet up and chat and act like friends, according to a new study published in the Plos Biology journal.

Scientists attached tiny "backpack computers" to 50 female vampire bats to study how they interact in their roosts.

Vampire bats live up to the name and feed off the blood of sleeping animals, and it appears that they may share information on these tasty snacks with their buddies!

They found that bats who hung around together in the roost would leave separately but meet up and share information whilst hunting for food - similar to friends meeting up for some shopping!

Co-author, Simon Ripperger, said: "I could see them vocalize even if they were alone on a cow, and they vocalize back and forth, so we can tell that they interact while they're feeding."

Bats stick together in a roost, and they have been observed grooming each other and forming close bonds

The study looked at the behaviour of bats inside and outside of their roosts on a cattle pasture in Tole, Panama.

Scientists chose 50 bats to study, 23 of those were already in captivity and 27 had been living in the wilderness.

After fitting the miniature backpack computers to them, they released all the bats back into the wild to study how they interact with each other.

The bats that spent the most time grooming each other inside of the roost, also spent the most time meeting up together whilst out looking for food.

The bats leave the roost separately but would often meet up with other bats they bonded with, and appear to "speak to each other".

There were three distinct call types from the bats whilst they were hunting: a downward sweeping social call, angry buzz calls, and feeding calls.

Researchers believe "bats may meet up with trusted partners during foraging trips to share information about hosts or access to an open wound," according to the journal.