Date:
June 19, 2020
Source:
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Searching
for food at night can be tricky. To find prey in the dark, bats use
echolocation, their "sixth sense." But to find food faster, some species,
like Molossus molossus, may search within hearing distance of their
echolocating group members, sharing information about where food patches are
located. Social information encoded in their echolocation calls may facilitate
this foraging strategy, according to a recent study by Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute (STRI) scientists and collaborating institutions published
online in Behavioral Ecology.
Previous
research has identified several ways in which echolocation can transfer social
information in bats. For example, "feeding buzzes," the echolocation
calls bats produce to home in on prey they've spotted, can serve as cues of
prey presence to nearby eavesdropping bats. On the other hand, echolocation
calls that bats produce while looking for food, called "search-phase"
calls, were not known to transfer social information.
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