Risk-taking Urban bats vs. hesitant rural bats: urbanization drives behavioral flexibility and brain plasticity in Egyptian fruit bats

Published: 17 January 2021| Version 1 | DOI: 10.17632/rn268h9cmy.1
Contributors:
, Sahar Hajyahia, Yniv Assaf, Yossi Yovel

Description

Urbanization is arguably the most dramatic phenomenon influencing animals around the world. Although many behavioral adjustments have been described in urban animal populations, we know very little about the possible impacts of urbanization on animals' brains. Egyptian fruit bats thrive in both urban and rural environments, but they are faced with very different challenges in these two environments. We show that urban fruit bats are significantly bolder than rural bats, a characteristic that is probably crucial for their survival in urban environments. Magnetic Resonance Imaging revealed that the brains of the two populations differ in areas related to navigation, sensing and reward. Over a month in the lab, both rural and urban bats became bolder and a correlation between brain and behavior suggests that neural plasticity in the brain's fear-related network and specifically in the amygdala is related to this behavioral flexibility. Linking brain plasticity with behavioral flexibility in wild free-behaving animals is very difficult. This study shows the potential of combining non-invasive imaging and behavioral assay in order to reveal the impact of global ecological changes on wild animals. The data presented here is the preprocessed MRI scans of 84 urban (city) and rural (country) bats. It was preprocessed and asigned into 3 contrasts: gray matter (GM) derived from anatomical scans, and functional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) derived from DTI scans. The numbers at the scans names denote specific individual bats, with the same numbers in the before and after scans. In the sorted data folder, you can find all the scans divided into the 3 different contrast. inside each contrast folder there are 16 folders- 8 for urban bats start with U and 8 folders for rural bats start with R, the numbers 1-5 are batch numbers- different repetitions of the experiment and for batches 1-3 there are 2 scans available (before and after), folders with the "after" scans end with b. The folder scripts contains Matlab scripts and mat files that were used in the data analysis. The main script is "full_analysis" that uses other scripts from the folder for the statistical analysis. In the sorted data folder there is Masks folder in which you can find 2 masks that are needed for the scripts and a mean bat file to visualize the results on.

Files

Institutions

Tel Aviv University

Categories

Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Urbanization, Bat

Licence