Study of bats finds that couples that eat together, mate together

Reuters - Couples that eat together tend to mate, an Israeli study of fruit bats has found. Having noted a pattern of female Egyptian fruit bats taking food from the mouths of males in captivity, Tel Aviv University researchers discovered what they called a "strong correlation" with the pairs going on to reproduce together. "So it is a kind of food-for-sex situation, where males over the year produce food, give it to females repeatedly and later on mate and bear their young," Lee Harten of the university's zoology department told Reuters. DNA tests were conducted on bat pups to determine paternity for the study, which was published in Current Biology magazine this month. Such hypotheses, Harten said, "have never been found in bats and to be honest not in many mammals, and usually it's discerned from mating. Here we went a step further, and we actually saw the end point - so actually it's food-for-genes."