Baby Talk: Bat Pups Babble Like Human Infants

By studying the vocal behavior of 20 baby bats from birth to weaning, researchers have identified striking similarities between how young humans and bats develop communication skills.

Written byAnnie Melchor

| 4 min read

A woman sits with a camera and recording equipment in a jungle looking up at a tree full of bats (unseen).

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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 ...

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A woman sits with a camera and recording equipment looking up at a tree full of bats (unseen).

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Meet the Author

Annie Melchor
Stephanie "Annie" Melchor got her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2020, studying how the immune response to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii leads to muscle wasting and tissue scarring in mice. While she is still an ardent immunology fangirl, she left the bench to become a science writer and received her master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2021. You can check out more of her work here.
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