Bats are able to remember complex social structures, including whether another bat is a friend or foe and exactly where they and their friends are, according to researchers in Israel.

The study, led by Professor Nachum Ulanovsky at the Weizmann Institute of Science, focused on nerve cells in the hippocampus region of bats brains and their role in encoding details about other individuals in the same social group.

"We've set up a colony of bats, like a cave of bats, in the lab," Professor Nachum Ulanovsky told Reuters.

The animals, Egyptian fruit bats, are fitted with miniature wireless-electrophysiology back-packs to record their brain activity during flight.

The bats were also tagged and barcoded to track their locations and identities in 3D, with video cameras recording their head movements and social interactions.

"Social interactions are being represented," he said.

"Is it a male or a female? So the sex of the other individual and its hierarchy. Is it higher than myself in hierarchy, like an alpha male, or lower in hierarchy? And also their affiliation. Is it a friend of mine or a foe? That's also a variable that's being represented. So a very rich representation of both information about self and others and in fact, many other others," said Ulanovsky, who heads the Center for Learning, Memory and Cognition.

The research, presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies Forum 2024, is the first to observe such complex social encoding in large, mixed-sex groups of wild, social animals.

Ulanovsky plans to continue his research on the brain during naturalistic behaviors, anticipating similar findings in humans due to the structural similarities between bat and human hippocampi.

"We ourselves are not working on... Alzheimer drugs or anything like that, but just want to be clear, we're really trying to understand the basic functions, but I think that by understanding the function in adults and aging that this will also help shed light on these functions," he said.

(Production: Stuart McDill)