Small mouse-tailed bats live in large communities of several million individuals, in caves in the southern US, Mexico, Central America, Chile, and Argentina. Every night, that flying mass devours tons of insects.
Now, a team of researchers from the universities of Maryland and Wake Forest, in the US, has found that to get hold of the prey , these mammals of just 9 centimeters and 15 grams in weight interfere with the echolocation system of their competitors.
This mechanism works as a kind of biological sonar: bats emit sounds and translate the echo they receive when they reach an object, allowing them to know what is around them even in the dark. However, as explained in the study that these experts have published in the journal Science , when they perceive that a fellow man is pursuing a goal, they launch a call at a certain frequency that hinders that ability. What’s more, they can get into a kind of interception competition, until one of them gives up.
“With this, we already know three functions of the sounds that bats generate; they serve them to communicate, like sonar and as a form of acoustic interference , ”says biologist Aaron Corcoran, from the University of Maryland. To demonstrate this, the scientists recorded the interactions between wild specimens with high-sensitivity cameras and ultrasonic microphones, allowing them to recreate their flight in detail from the sounds they emitted.
So far, they have only detected this ability in Mexican mouse-tailed bats ; it is not known whether it is also possessed by other species that use a similar location system, such as dolphins.
Photo: Nickolay Hristov
