Spatial learning overshadows learning novel odors and sounds in both a predatory and a frugivorous bat

To be efficient while foraging, animals should be selective about attending to and remembering the cues of food that best predict future meals. One hypothesis is that animals with different foraging strategies should vary in their reliance on spatial and feature cues. Animals that store food or feed on spatially stable food, like fruit or flowers, should be predisposed to learning a meal's location, whereas predators that hunt mobile prey should instead be biased towards learning feature cues such as color or sound. Previous studies suggest that nectar- and fruit-feeding bats should rely relatively more on spatial cues, whereas predatory bats should rely more on feature cues, yet no experiment has compared these two foraging strategies under the same conditions. To test this hypothesis, we compared learning in the frugivorous bat, Artibeus jamaicensis , and the predatory bat, Lophostoma silvicolum , which hunts katydids using acoustic cues. We trained bats to find food paired with a unique odor, sound, and location. We then dissociated these cues to assess which cue each bat had learned. Rather than finding that the frugivore and predator are on opposite ends of a continuum in their relative reliance on spatial and feature cues, we found that both species learned spatial cues with no evidence that either learned the sounds or odors. We discuss interpretations of these results in the context of past work on use of spatial cues versus feature cues. Compared to feature cues, spatial cues may be fundamentally more rich, salient, or memorable. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.