Bats wearing small microphones reveal how flyers can avoid rush hour collisions

The first bat tolerant microphone helps biologists study bats’ good safety records to avoid collisions in rush hour air.

In about a minute on a summer evening, around 2,000 large mouse-tailed bats gather from a cave that opens only about three metres of corner of Israel’s Hula Valley, says Yossijobel, neurologist at Tel Aviv University. From afar, their appearances look like “smoke plumes,” he says.

He and his colleagues are now studying echolocation chirp Rhinopoma Microphyllum Bats detect obstacles that include each other. On a busy flight, Signals from one bat often partially mask neighborsthe researcher reports on April 8th. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is the flying mammal version of the communication confusion of cocktail party mammals. However, the team discovered that these bats had surprisingly few conflicts.

Studying thousands of bats is not easy. At first, “We could only record bats from the ground,” Jubel says. It’s so limited the information that he and his colleagues designed a microphone small enough to hold it (temporarily) secured to a bat weighing about 40 grams, which is lighter than a newborn kitten. The goal was to create a device that would only add 4 grams to the weight of a flying animal.

Researchers used aerial recordings from four small microphones and flight paths from 96 tracking bats to create computer models of bat exit and echolocation. Listening to this bat version of sonar, chirp and echo can find obstacles, prey and each other.

The tight exit holes in the cave allow you to mask 90% of the chirp in the echolocation. However, pingings from important closet neighbours in the crowds tend not to be like that from bat neighbors, especially from the front bats. Additionally, Chirp “has a lot of redundancy,” Jubel says. Ultimately, there’s enough portion of the message going through.

He also adds, “The moment they come out of the hole, they start to move to the side,” reducing the risk of collision. As they fly over a kilometre in the formation of a flock of smoke, the distance hit from the bat leaves the room to hear themselves echolocate.

The paper itself is Fringe Lip Bat Cocktail Party Challenge Hunt frogs in Central and South America. The target by sound alone is the dissonant challenge of the frog pool. But bat echolocation can call the frog balloon throat pouch.