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Hearing mediates many behaviours critical for survival in echolocating bats, including foraging and navigation. Although most mammals are susceptible to progressive age-related hearing loss, the evolution of biosonar, which requires the ability to hear low-intensity echoes from outgoing sonar signals, may have selected against the development of hearing deficits in bats. Many echolocating bats exhibit exceptional longevity and rely on acoustic behaviours for survival to old age; however, relatively little is known about the ageing bat auditory system. In this study, we used DNA methylation to estimate the ages of wild-caught big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) and measured hearing sensitivity in young and ageing bats using auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) and distortion product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAEs). We found no evidence for hearing deficits in bats up to 12.5 years of age, demonstrated by comparable thresholds and similar ABR and DPOAE amplitudes across age groups. We additionally found no significant histological evidence for cochlear ageing, with similar hair cell counts, afferent and efferent innervation patterns in young and ageing bats. Here, we demonstrate that big brown bats show minimal evidence for age-related hearing loss and therefore represent informative models for investigating mechanisms that may preserve hearing function over a long lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exaggerated ornaments provide opportunities to understand how selection can operate at different levels to shape the evolution of a trait. While these features aid their bearer in attracting mates or fending off competitors, they can also be costly and influenced by the environment and genetic variation. The eyestalks of the stalk-eyed fly, Teleopsis dalmanni, are of interest because eyestalk length is the target of both intra- and intersexual selection and is also reduced by loci on a highly-divergent sex ratio X chromosome (XSR), a meiotic driver accounting for up to 30% of wild X chromosomes. Male stalk-eyed flies fight to control access to females and over food using a combination of low-intensity displays and highintensity physical fights. We staged, filmed, and scored contests between pairs of eyespan-matched males to evaluate whether X chromosome type impacts the behavior and outcome of aggressive interactions. While our results broadly match expectations from previous studies, we found that XSR males used more high-intensity behaviors than males carrying a non-driving, standard X chromosome (XST), particularly when their eyestalks were of similar size or smaller than their opponents. Additionally, we found that when XSR males use high-intensity behaviors, they win more bouts than when they use low-intensity behaviors. Taken together, these results suggest that XSR impacts male aggressive behavior to compensate for the shorter eyestalks of XSR males and may help to explain how this selfish chromosome is maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bats (order Chiroptera) are emerging as instructive animal models for aging studies. Unlike some common laboratory species, they meet a central criterion for aging studies: they live for a long time in the wild or in captivity, for 20, 30, and even >40 years. Healthy aging (i.e., healthspan) in bats has drawn attention to their potential to improve the lives of aging humans due to bat imperviousness to viral infections, apparent low rate of tumorigenesis, and unique ability to repair DNA. At the same time, bat longevity also permits the accumulation of age‐associated systemic pathologies that can be examined in detail and manipulated, especially in captive animals. Research has uncovered additional and critical advantages of bats. In multiple ways, bats are better analogs to humans than are rodents. In this review, we highlight eight diverse areas of bat research with relevance to aging: genome sequencing, telomeres, and DNA repair; immunity and inflammation; hearing; menstruation and menopause; skeletal system and fragility; neurobiology and neurodegeneration; stem cells; and senescence and mortality. These examples demonstrate the broad relevance of the bat as an animal model and point to directions that are particularly important for human aging studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social structure can emerge from hierarchically embedded scales of movement, where movement at one scale is constrained within a larger scale (e.g. among branches, trees, forests). In most studies of animal social networks, some scales of movement are not observed, and the relative importance of the observed scales of movement is unclear. Here, we asked: how does individual variation in movement, at multiple nested spatial scales, influence each individual's social connectedness? Using existing data from common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), we created an agent-based model of how three nested scales of movement—among roosts, clusters and grooming partners—each influence a bat's grooming network centrality. In each of 10 simulations, virtual bats lacking social and spatial preferences moved at each scale at empirically derived rates that were either fixed or individually variable and either independent or correlated across scales. We found that numbers of partners groomed per bat were driven more by within-roost movements than by roost switching, highlighting that co-roosting networks do not fully capture bat social structure. Simulations revealed how individual variation in movement at nested spatial scales can cause false discovery and misidentification of preferred social relationships. Our model provides several insights into how nonsocial factors shape social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental evolution provides an integrative method for revealing complex interactions among evolutionary processes. One such interaction involves sex-linked selfish genetic elements and sexual selection. X-linked segregation distorters, a type of selfish genetic element, influence sperm transmission to increase in frequency and consequently alter the population sex ratio and the opportunity for sexual selection, while sexual selection may impact the spread of X-linked distorters. Here we manipulated sexual selection by controlling female mating opportunities and the presence of a distorting X chromosome in experimental lines of the stalk-eyed fly, Teleopsis dalmanni, over 11 generations. We find that removal of sexual selection leads to an increase in the frequency of the X-linked distorter and sex ratio across generations and that post-copulatory sexual selection alone is sufficient to limit the frequency of distorters. In addition, we find that male eyestalk length, a trait under pre-copulatory sexual selection, evolves in response to changes in the strength of sexual selection with the magnitude of the response dependent on X chromosome type and the frequency of distorting X chromosomes. These results reveal how a selfish X can interact with sexual selection to influence the evolution of sexually selected traits in multiple ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stalk-eyed flies in the genus Teleopsis carry selfish genetic elements that induce sex ratio (SR) meiotic drive and impact the fitness of male and female carriers. Here, we assemble and describe a chromosome-level genome assembly of the stalk-eyed fly, Teleopsis dalmanni , to elucidate patterns of divergence associated with SR. The genome contains tens of thousands of transposable element (TE) insertions and hundreds of transcriptionally and insertionally active TE families. By resequencing pools of SR and ST males using short and long reads, we find widespread differentiation and divergence between XSR and XST associated with multiple nested inversions involving most of the SR haplotype. Examination of genomic coverage and gene expression data revealed seven X-linked genes with elevated expression and coverage in SR males. The most extreme and likely drive candidate involves an XSR-specific expansion of an array of partial copies of JASPer, a gene necessary for maintenance of euchromatin and associated with regulation of TE expression. In addition, we find evidence for rapid protein evolution between XSR and XST for testis expressed and novel genes, that is, either recent duplicates or lacking a Dipteran ortholog, including an X-linked duplicate of maelstrom , which is also involved in TE silencing. Overall, the evidence suggests that this ancient XSR polymorphism has had a variety of impacts on repetitive DNA and its regulation in this species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]