Hunting bats adjust their echolocation to receive weak prey echoes for clutter reduction
Open Access
- 5 March 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science Advances
- Vol. 7 (10), eabf1367
- https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf1367
Abstract
How animals extract information from their surroundings to guide motor patterns is central to their survival. Here, we use echo-recording tags to show how wild hunting bats adjust their sensory strategies to their prey and natural environment. When searching, bats maximize the chances of detecting small prey by using large sensory volumes. During prey pursuit, they trade spatial for temporal information by reducing sensory volumes while increasing update rate and redundancy of their sensory scenes. These adjustments lead to very weak prey echoes that bats protect from interference by segregating prey sensory streams from the background using a combination of fast-acting sensory and motor strategies. Counterintuitively, these weak sensory scenes allow bats to be efficient hunters close to background clutter broadening the niches available to hunt for insects.Funding Information
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (241711556)
- Carlsbergfondet (Semper Ardens)
This publication has 42 references indexed in Scilit:
- Big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) reveal diverse strategies for sonar target tracking in clutterThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2016
- Echolocating Big Brown Bats, Eptesicus fuscus, Modulate Pulse Intervals to Overcome Range Ambiguity in Cluttered SurroundingsFrontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2016
- Dynamics of the echolocation beam during prey pursuit in aerial hawking batsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015
- Scene analysis in the natural environmentFrontiers in Psychology, 2014
- Echolocation call intensity in the aerial hawking batEptesicus bottae(Vespertilionidae) studied using stereo videogrammetryJournal of Experimental Biology, 2005
- Echolocation behavior of big brown bats, Eptesicus fuscus, in the field and the laboratoryThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2000
- Insect pursuit, prey capture and echolocation in pipestirelle bats (Microchiroptera)Animal Behaviour, 1995
- The Determination of Distance by Echolocating BatsNature, 1964
- The echolocation of flying insects by batsAnimal Behaviour, 1960
- Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats and RadarScience, 1944