DOI: 10.5061/dryad.rv15dv47b
title: Little brown myotis social networks

description: Bats are a group of mammals well known for forming dynamic social groups.
 Studies of bat social structures are often based upon the frequency at
 which bats occupy the same roosts because observing bats directly is not
 always possible. However, it is not always clear how closely bats
 occupying the same roost associate with each other, obscuring whether
 associations result from social relationships or factors such as shared
 preferences for roosts. Our goal was to determine if bats cohabitating
 buildings were also found together inside roosts by using anti-collision
 technology for PIT tags, which enables simultaneous detection of multiple
 tags. We PIT-tagged 293 female little brown myotis (Myotis lucifugus) and
 installed antennas within two buildings used as maternity roosts in
 Yellowstone National Park. Antennas were positioned at roost entryways to
 generate cohabitation networks and along regions of attic ceilings in each
 building to generate intra-roost networks based on proximity of bats to
 each other. We found that intra-roost and cohabitation networks of
 buildings were significantly correlated, with the same bats tending to be
 linked in both networks, but that bats cohabitating the same building
 often roosted apart, leading to differing assessments of social structure.
 Cohabitation rates implied that bats associate with a greater number of
 their roost-mates than was supported by observations within the roost.
 This caused social networks built upon roost cohabitation rates to be
 denser, smaller in diameter, and contain nodes with higher average degree
 centrality. These results show that roost cohabitation does not reflect
 preference for roost-mates in little brown myotis, as is often inferred
 from similar studies, and that social network analyses based on
 cohabitation may provide misleading results.
description: Data were collected by scanning bats marked with uniquely
 identifiable PIT-tags using RFID antennas. Antennas were placed inside
 building roosts known to be used by female little brown myotis. For
 further details, see the referenced publication. 
description: The uploaded data at one-mode bat-by-bat matrices from each of
 the six networks constructed for the publication. As the publication
 describes, there are two roosts: one in Lamar Valley and one in Mammoth.
 There are two files for Lamar Valley because this roost was successfully
 studied in 2017 and 2018. Each file corresponds to one year of data. The
 Mammoth roost was only studied in 2018. Within each file there are two
 tabs. One contains the bat-by-bat matrix for data collected by antennas on
 the roost ceiling (intra-roost) and the other for data collected by
 antennas at roost entrayways (cohabitation). In each tab, rows and columns
 contain unique 4-character alphanumeric identifiers corresponding a bat.
 For the cohabitation matrices, the numbers in each cell correspond to the
 number of days a dyad (the combination of the bat identifiers at the
 intersection of a row and column) spent roosting togeher. For intra-roost
 matrices, the numbers in each cell correspond to hours detected at the
 same antenna.