ABOVE: Ahana Fernandez studies bat vocalizations at a field site in Central America.
MICHAEL STIFTER
Before sunrise, Ahana Fernandez walks into a Costa Rican forest, carefully sets up her recording equipment near a grove of trees, and then waits. And watches. The trees are nurseries for the greater sac-winged bat (Saccopteryx bilineata), where each mother bat roosts close to her pup. When Fernandez notices one of the baby bats opening its mouth to chatter, she points her camera and microphone in its direction to listen in.
After following the same 20 pups from birth to weaning, recording and analyzing their tiny utterances, Fernandez and her colleagues made an observation they published yesterday (August 19) in Science: infant bats babble in much the same way human infants do.
Babbling isn’t the same as crying or trying to communicate something to an adult—Fernandez calls it “vocal play.” Human babbling happens when babies play ...
