When a bat colony leaves the cave and takes them into the sky at night, they often do so in groups that look like one giant chunk. While we sometimes count how these winged mammals can achieve such density with hundreds of thousands of bats, yachts do not collide with each other.
Now, researchers believe they understand how bats still can hear in a DIN that resembles a loud cocktail party. They appear to change the way they echo in order to better understand where the bats closest to them are. For more information about the survey results, please see Research published in the journal on March 31st Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bat “Cocktail Party”
Like dolphins, toothed whales and some birds, many bat species use echolocation to perceive the world around them. They send a call and hear the reflected echoes. This echo allows you to “see” what’s in front of them.
However, if many bats are echoing at once – when the entire colony comes out of the cave in a few minutes, noise from others should cover important echo information that the bat needs to avoid. This loss of acoustic information is It is called “jamming.” Bats should collide due to jamming, but air accidents outside the cave are actually very rare.
“You’re almost excited when you witness it,” says Aya Goldshtein, co-author and postdoctoral scholar of the study in animal behavior at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Germany. said in a statement.
A video showing the evening appearance of thousands of mousetail bats as they take them into the sky in search of insects. This video shows a rare collision of a bat in the air. Credits: Yossi Yovel and Eran Amichai.
Scientists deployed several techniques into the lab, experimenting with how bats sound around all of this surrounding chatter, like the noise inside a crowded restaurant. They studied how bats echo in groups by looking at how bats penetrate at slightly different frequencies. In theory, this You need to reduce jamminghowever, the results of previous studies did not provide a strong enough answer as to how or why.
“No one saw this situation in terms of individual bats during its appearance. Can we understand behavior if we don’t study in action?” Yoshijobel, a research co-author and neurologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, Israel. said in a statement.
In the cave
for This studyThe team studied Larger Mouthtail Bat (Rhinopoma Microphyllum) They lived in the Hula Valley, Israel and collected data directly from wild bats that emerged from caves at dusk for two years. They tagged some bats in this colony with some bats on a light tracker that recorded their locations every second. Some tags also featured ultrasound microphones that recorded soundscapes from a bat point of view. To study this behavior, they used a new combination of high-resolution tracking, ultrasound reporting, and sensorimotor computer modeling to observe how bats were squeezed out of the cave opening.
However, tagged bats were released outside the cave and into emerging colonies. This means that data taken from the cave opening is missing at the highest density. To fill this gap, the team used a Calculation model Developed by Study co-author Omer Mazar. Using data collected by trackers and microphones, this model recreated the complete behavioral sequence that began at the entrance to the cave and was enveloped after bats flew 1.2 miles (2 km) through the valley.
“This simulation allows us to test assumptions about how bats can solve this complex task during their emergence,” says Mazar, a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University. said in a statement.
Bat’s POV
Data revealed that bats experience a call’s cacole’s dissonance when leaving the cave. It contains 94% of echocolocations, but bats are significantly more Reduced echolocation clogs within 5 seconds of leaving the cave. Bats were also observed Two important behavioral changes. First, they incited from the core of dense colonies, while maintaining the group structure. Then they sent shorter calls and weaker calls at higher frequencies.
Initially, the team suspected that bats would reduce jamming by quickly dispersing them out of the cave. Instead, it appears to change echolocation to a higher frequency, even though it only increases the risk of interference and conflict. The team had to approach this to understand why. The whole scene from a bat perspective.
[ Related: What bats and metal vocalists have in common. ]
“Imagine you’re a bat flying through a messy space. The most important object you need to know is the previous bat. So you should echolocate it in a way that provides the most detailed information about that bat alone,” explained Mazar. “You certainly might miss most of the information available for jamming, but that doesn’t matter because you only need enough detail to avoid hitting that bat.”
Bats appear to change their way of echoing to get more information about nearby neighbors. This strategy appears to help them eventually bounce back at each other and avoid bumping into each other.
According to the teamwhich has enabled this unexpected result of bats to resolve by studying bats in their natural environment.
“Past theoretical and lab research allowed us to imagine possibilities,” Goldstein said. “But only by putting yourself in the animal’s shoes as close as possible can we understand the challenges they face and what they will do to solve them.”
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