Date: October 16, 2018
Source: Molecular Biology and Evolution (Oxford University Press)
Could bats' cave-dwelling nocturnal habits over eons enhanced their echolocation acoustic abilities, but also spurred their loss of vision?
A new study led by Bruno Simões, Emma Teeling and colleagues has examined this question in the evolution of color vision genes across a large and diverse group of bat species.
They show that the popular expression of being "blind as a bat" really doesn't hold true. Some bats that have the most advanced type of echolocation appear to have traded UV vision for exquisite hearing, and all bats that do not echolocate but live in caves have also lost UV vision. This suggests that not all bats are blind but some certainly have selected other senses over vision.
"Bats' sensory abilities have long been a source of fascination for evolutionary biologists," said Emma Teeling, the corresponding author of the study, which appears in the advanced online edition of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. "Using phylogenetics and molecular biology we are now able to delve more deeply into the evolutionary price of acquiring echolocation and nocturnality."
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