The recent discovery of the first mammal that deposits significant amounts of carotenoid pigments in the skin has highlighted the presence of conspicuous yellow coloration in the bare skin of some bats. This is patent in the subfamily Stenodermatinae, where many species build tents with plant leaves for communal roosting at daytime. Here, authors hypothesized that tent?roosting may have driven the evolution of yellow skin coloration in this group of bats.

Bats are assumed not to use vision for communication, despite recent evidence of their capacity for color vision. The possibility that bats use color traits as signals has thus been overlooked. Some tent-roosting bats have a potential for visual signaling because they exhibit bright yellow skin, a trait that in birds often acts as a sexual signal. The authors searched for evidence of sexual dichromatism in the yellow bare skin of Honduran white bats Ectophylla alba.