A hollow Manilkara chicle tree trunk in Guanacaste, Costa Rica houses a roost of spectral bats comprising a monogamous pair and two pups. A wildlife camera recorded minute-long videos over three months whenever the bats exited the roost, producing 73 clips of behavior. The bats forage for mice, rats, motmots, and occasionally other bats, sometimes returning with prey and willingly passing meals to roost-mates. The bats greet and groom each other, engage in play, and sleep together in a clustered communal position described as a "cuddle ball." These behaviors reflect pronounced social cooperation within a confined roost.
By night, spectral bats leave their roost and swoop through the tree canopy of Costa Rica, wings outstretched as far as three feet wide, in search of prey: unsuspecting mice and rats, birds called motmots, even other bats. Sometimes, after they snag something good, they will fly back home with the doomed victim in their stalactite teeth and willingly give up a meal to another bat inside the roost. At the end of the day, the world's largest carnivorous bat is a rather cooperative creature.
The roost in question is inside of the hollow trunk of a Manilkara chicle tree. Marisa Tietge, a behavioral ecologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, first found the roost in December 2022, when it held four spectral bats: a monogamous mated pair and their two pups. A year later, the researchers placed a wildlife camera inside the roost, which automatically recorded minute-long videos over the course of three months whenever the bats left the roost.
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