FOODSHARING AS A TOOL FOR CRISIS MANAGEMENT AND ACHIEVEMENT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

The global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to look at development issues in a new way. As a result, many decision-makers have realized the importance of rebuilding economies with a sustainable development approach that involves investing not in fossil fuels but in renewable energies, reforestation, sustainable food systems, and cyclical, local and low-carbon economies. In this connection, the article considers food sharing as one of the possible mechanisms contributing to the achievement of sustainable development goals and at the same time being an anti-crisis management tool. At the same time, this article gives directly the goals in the field of sustainable development, the state of affairs in the field of achieving the set goals in modern realities, the measures taken at the international level and in Russia, the essence of food sharing is also revealed, examples of foreign practices are given, problems that impede development are identified of food sharing in Russia, possible options for their solutions are proposed and promising results after its implementation are reflected, as well as a table with the effect of food sharing on specific goals of sustainable development has been compiled by the generalization method. This article can be useful to people interested in the rational use of food, businesses in order to restructure business processes to meet the requirements of the modern economy and government officials for timely and effective adoption of measures in the field of sustainable development.

Social foraging in vampire bats is predicted by long-term cooperative relationships

Stable social bonds in group-living animals can provide greater access to food. A striking example is that female vampire bats often regurgitate blood to socially bonded kin and nonkin that failed in their nightly hunt. Food-sharing relationships form via preferred associations and social grooming within roosts. However, it remains unclear whether these cooperative relationships extend beyond the roost. To evaluate if long-term cooperative relationships in vampire bats play a role in foraging, we tested if foraging encounters measured by proximity sensors could be explained by wild roosting proximity, kinship, or rates of co-feeding, social grooming, and food sharing during 21 months in captivity. We assessed evidence for 6 hypothetical scenarios of social foraging, ranging from individual to collective hunting. We found that closely bonded female vampire bats departed their roost separately, but often reunited far outside the roost. Repeating foraging encounters were predicted by within-roost association and histories of cooperation in captivity, even when accounting for kinship. Foraging bats demonstrated both affiliative and competitive interactions with different social calls linked to each interaction type. We suggest that social foraging could have implications for social evolution if “local” within-roost cooperation and “global” outside-roost competition enhances fitness interdependence between frequent roostmates.

Social dominance and cooperation in female vampire bats

When group-living animals develop individualized social relationships, they often regulate cooperation and conflict through a dominance hierarchy. Female common vampire bats have been an experimental system for studying cooperative relationships, yet surprisingly little is known about female conflict. Here, we recorded the outcomes of 1023 competitive interactions over food provided ad libitum in a captive colony of 33 vampire bats (24 adult females and their young). We found a weakly linear dominance hierarchy using three common metrics (Landau's h ’ measure of linearity, triangle transitivity and directional consistency). However, patterns of female dominance were less structured than in many other group-living mammals. Female social rank was not clearly predicted by body size, age, nor reproductive status, and competitive interactions were not correlated with kinship, grooming nor food sharing. We therefore found no evidence that females groomed or shared food up a hierarchy or that differences in rank explained asymmetries in grooming or food sharing. A possible explanation for such apparently egalitarian relationships among female vampire bats is the scale of competition. Female vampire bats that are frequent roostmates might not often directly compete for food in the wild.