By Susan Milius
For the first time, scientists have described the male bat’s equivalent of slapping on aftershave before hovering around his harem.
About the same time every afternoon, male sac-winged bats in a colony all settle down to refill pouches on their wings with urine and other bodily secretions, report Christian C. Voigt of Boston University and Otto von Helversen of the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany.
In the December 1999 Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, they describe the seduction secrets of Saccopteryx bilineata, a small bat of the New World tropics. Keeping body odor at its most alluring makes sense, they say, for males that fan their fragrance in daily displays for up to eight females.