Hunting Bats Adjust Their Echolocation to Receive Weak Prey Echoes for Clutter Reduction

Overview

Journal Sci Adv

Specialties Biology
Science

Date 2021 Mar 4

PMID 33658207

Citations 9

Authors

Laura Stidsholt

Stefan Greif

Holger R Goerlitz

Kristian Beedholm

Jamie Macaulay

Mark Johnson

Peter Teglberg Madsen

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

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.

Citing Articles

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Foskolos I, Hubancheva A, Skalshoi M, Beedholm K, Madsen P, Stidsholt L BMC Biol. 2025; 23(1):21.

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Welfare and Enrichment of Managed Nocturnal Species, Supported by Technology.

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Daubenton's bats maintain stereotypical echolocation behaviour and a lombard response during target interception in light.

Uebel A, Pedersen M, Beedholm K, Stidsholt L, Skalshoi M, Foskolos I BMC Zool. 2024; 9(1):9.

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Calibrated microphone array recordings reveal that a gleaning bat emits low-intensity echolocation calls even in open-space habitat.

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