ABOVE: Greater mouse-eared bats
STEFAN GREIF
The paper
L. Stidsholt et al., “Hunting bats adjust their echolocation to receive weak prey echoes for clutter reduction,” Sci Adv, 10:eabf1367, 2021.
Most of what is known about bat echolocation has been learned under controlled laboratory conditions or in the wild with stationary microphones. While these setups have revealed that bat calls and flight trajectories change during hunting sessions, they are less than ideal for understanding the complex dynamics of how bats “see” their environments through the echoes of those calls.
“It’s so hard to study, especially in the wild, because how do we record how animals perceive the world?” says Laura Stidsholt of Aarhus University in Denmark. To get a better understanding of bat echolocation, Stidsholt and other researchers traveled to the Orlova Chuka cave in Bulgaria, where a colony of greater mouse-eared bats (Myotis myotis) live. There the researchers captured 10 females and ...
