Echo Navigator
Using echolocation, bats can “see” in complete darkness with incredible precision.
Bats are shy and gentle. The only reason a bat would come anywhere near you is because you’re a mosquito magnet! Seriously, if a bat is swooping toward you with any kind of intention, it’s to feast on the mosquitoes hovering around you.
Producing guano is one activity that bats do NOT do while hanging upside down. They flip. Do their business. Flip back. Bats are fastidious about stuff like this and probably spend more time grooming than we do.
Researchers have discovered this vocal learning skill in baby Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus, pictured), a highly social species found from Africa to Pakistan. Only a handful of other mammals, including cetaceans and certain insectivorous bats, are vocal learners. The adult fruit bats have a rich vocal repertoire of mouselike squeaks and chatter. The scientists suspected the bat pups had to learn these sounds. To find out, they placed baby bats with their mothers in isolation chambers for 5 months and made video and audio recordings of each pair.
Lacking any other adults to vocalize to, the mothers were silent, and their babies made only isolation calls and babbling sounds, the researchers report today in Science Advances. As a control, the team raised another group of bat pups with their mothers and fathers, who chattered to each other. Soon, the control pups’ babbling gave way to specific sounds that matched those of their mothers. But the isolated pups quickly overcame the vocal gap after the scientists united both sets of bats—suggesting that unlike many songbird species (and more like humans), the fruit bats don’t have a limited period for vocal learning.
Contrary to folklore, bats are not blind, but because they are nocturnal, they rely on their ears more than their eyes to navigate and find food in the dark. Bats use a technique called echolocation, which is sort of like natural sonar. They generate extremely high-pitched noises, most of which are beyond the normal human hearing range. The sound waves bounce off objects and echo back to the bat. Bats’ unique facial features help them to perceive the sound waves, and the information they receive gives them the exact location of the food they are trying to catch or the obstacles they are trying to avoid.
A fungal disease called white-nose syndrome has claimed the lives of more than 5 million bats since its discovery in 2006 and has spread across North America at alarming rates. The fungus can be transmitted from bat to bat, cave to bat and even cave to cave as people inadvertently carry the fungus on shoes, clothing or equipment. Since many bats hibernate in the same caves over the winter, the fungus can decimate an entire bat colony once established.
More than 15 bat species are currently listed as federally endangered, threatened or under review in the candidate or petition process under the Endangered Species Act.
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