If you have any friends that you first met as a roommate or dorm neighbor at college, this show is for you.
Research from Ohio State University finds bats can become close when they’re made to live together.
For the study, researchers took 21 female vampire bats, seven from three very separate roosts.
They wanted to find out what happens when bats stop being polite… and start getting real.
At first, they all lived together as one big group for six weeks.
Then, the researchers had breakout sessions, so to speak, making seven groups featuring one bat from each of the three roosts.
They had their own quarters, away from the other bats, for one week, before returning to the large group for another nine weeks.
The scientists studied the bats’ grooming behaviors in all of the living arrangements to see which bats bonded with which.
The strongest bonds ended up between the small group roommates.
Even though they hadn’t known each other at all just a few weeks before, and only lived as a small group for a single week, they were still sharing the most grooming behavior together.
That was still true at the end of the third stage, when all the bats were in the same space.
The scientists compared this to college roommates who are randomly chosen to live together and they stay in touch even when they’ve moved elsewhere.
It’s probably not too surprising that humans do this in a lot of different areas of our lives, but now that we know it happens in the wild too, we can start looking for more clues about how animals bond with each other.
Maybe we’ll find some bears who accidentally hibernate in the same cave some winter, and then end up being besties.
Today in 1930, a newscast like no other.
A BBC announcer came on the air, said, “there is no news,” and the service played 15 minutes of piano music where the updates would normally be.
No news certainly beats too much news.
Like college roommates, vampire bats bond when randomly paired (Ohio State University)
#OnThisDay 1930: the BBC’s news announcer said, “there is no news” (BBCArchive on Twitter)
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