This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

Sharing a meal is a standard first step in the mating rituals of many mammals.

But Egyptian fruit bats take splitting an entree to a whole other level

because males that allow females to take the food right out of their mouths are

repaid with reproductive rights, and are more likely to sire offspring

with their favorite female fruit finagglers. That's according to a study in the journal Current Biology.

A couple years back, researchers noticed that in

fruit bat colonies some bats forage for food while others simply snatch it from

the forager's mouths. And there are different hypotheses for explaining this. Yasey Yalce Yavell of for

his

explaining this. Yase Yvesil of Tel Aviv University has studied these bats for years.

Maybe the Scroungers were relatives, he says,

or maybe they're just socially dominant bullies.

What we observed is that mostly scroungers are females.

Well, that got the researchers thinking about something of great importance to most animals,

reproduction. Specifically, we are wondering whether females might then mate with males that provide them with food.

So this was the hypothesis, the sex for food hypothesis that we tested.

Yvel and his colleagues monitored the interactions among bats in their colony for more than a year.

They checked the paternity of the baby bats that were born.

What they found is that

females were more likely to make babies with those males that provided free meals.

But Yvel says that the process is not strictly transactional.

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