ECOSTORIESPANAMA
December 2024
Parental care
Month's Subject: Parental care
To care or not to care?
Some animals take more care than others
There are many ways to ensure offspring. One extreme is to put all your energy in producing as many offspring as you can and spend no energy on caring for them. Many sea fish species have adopted this strategy. During the mating season, females and males swim close together and both release their eggs or sperm at the same time to ensure fertilization. Sometimes several males try to push each other out of the way to get as close to the spawning female as possible. Often, many males and females form a mating school with all individual fish releasing their eggs or sperm at the same time. The fertilized eggs float away with the currents, become part of the plankton. Mortality is high, but since millions of eggs are released, enough will survive to become adult fish.
In most of these species the females are larger than the males, because producing eggs takes more energy than producing sperm. Fish continue growing throughout their life (but at a much slower rate when they are adult) and the bigger the fish gets, the more eggs or sperm they produce. Therefore older (and presumably fitter) individuals contribute more to the next generation than younger individuals.
Arthropods
Bats are possibly the most succesful and most varied group of nocturnal animals. They fly at night and find their way using echolocation. THere are over a hundred species of bat in Panama and they have a large variety of survival strategies. Some hunt for flying insects, others search for insects crawling on leaves, or centipedes and large insects living in the eaf litter. There are two species of bat that catch fish, bats that feed on other bats and small birds, bats that feed on fruit and bats that feed on nectar. Some bats hunt frogs and locate them by the frogs own mating call.
And three species of bat, feared and vilified by almost everyone, feed on the blood of vertebrates. Two of these vampire bats feed mostly on birds, bu the third, most common species, feeds on the blood of mammals. The last one, aptly named the common vampire bat (Desmotus rotundus) has become quite common. The common vampire bat now mostly feeds on cattle and horses, which are common and widespread. Vampire bats live in colonies and frequently move from one colony to the next. Vampire bats develop social bonds with several other bats, some relatives, but also to unrelated individuals through mutual grooming and food sharing. The latter is very important because vampire bats can live only three days without food and rely on their friends for food when they fail to get a meal.
Prompt List
To be completed…
