S. PEUCHMAILLE
Spix’s disc-winged bats (Thyroptera tricolor) live in colonies in the unfurling leaves of tropical plants in South America. Gloriana Chaverri and Erin Gillam have now demonstrated that these bats’ choice of housing could be important for communication between group members, as the cone-shaped leaves amplify their calls. Their work was published this month (October 16) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The researchers—based at University of Costa Rica and North Dakota State University, respectively—recorded bat calls in the wild and also collected cone-shaped leaves from Heliconia or Calathea plants, which the winged mammals typically inhabit as roosts. Chaverri and Gillam then played the signals back in the lab with a speaker positioned at the top or inside the bottom of the cone with microphone ...
