Social calls in bats have many functions, including mate attraction and maintaining contact during flight. Research suggests that social calls may also be used to transfer information about roosts, but no studies have yet demonstrated that calls are used to actively attract conspecifics to roosting locations. We document the social calls used by Spix's disc-winged bat ( Thyroptera tricolor ) to actively recruit group members to roosts. In acoustic trials, we recorded two sets of calls; one from flying individuals termed ‘inquiry calls’, and another from roosting bats termed ‘response calls’. Inquiry calls were emitted by flying bats immediately upon release, and quickly (i.e. 178 ms) elicited production of response calls from roosting individuals. Most flying bats entered the roost when roosting individuals responded, while few bats entered the roost in the absence of a response. We argue that information transfer concerning roost location may facilitate sociality in T. tricolor , given the ephemeral nature of roosting structures used by this species.

Acoustic signals are important in maintaining group cohesion, particularly in highly mobile species. For these signals to facilitate group cohesion, individuals must be able to recognize, and respond to, calls emitted by group members. In this study, we document the use and recognition of complementary contact calls in Spix’s disc-winged bat (Thyroptera tricolor), a species known to form very stable social groups despite using an extremely ephemeral roosting resource. This bat uses 2 sets of calls: “inquiry,” which are emitted by flying bats that are seeking roosts or group mates, and “response,” which are produced in reply to an inquiry call by individuals that have already located a roost. Here, we test if bats are capable of discriminating between the inquiry and response calls of group and nongroup mates using playback experiments. Results show that flying bats can discriminate between the inquiry and response calls emitted by group and nongroup members and can maintain contact preferentially with the former. Roosting bats, however, exhibited no preference for group over nongroup members and thus responded indiscriminately. We argue that differences in how individuals respond to calls from group and nongroup members may be partly attributed to the costs associated with flight and the potential benefits of recruiting roost mates.