Info on Bats | The acoustic mirror - How bats sense water surfaces

Info on Bats | The acoustic mirror - How bats water surfaces

This stunning slow motion footage shows how bats use echolocation to find water.  We know how bats echolocate to hunt insects, but this is the first study to show how they recognise large, flat objects like ponds.  Moreover, by testing young bats that had never encountered a pond or river before, the researchers showed that bats seem to have a built-in ability to recognize these important features of their environment. Read the original research paper here:

• nature.com / Innate recognition of water bodies in echolocating bats

Abstract
In the course of their lives, most animals must find different specific habitat and microhabitat types for survival and reproduction. Yet, in vertebrates, little is known about the sensory cues that mediate habitat recognition. In free flying bats the echolocation of insect-sized point targets is well understood, whereas how they recognize and classify spatially extended echo targets is currently unknown. In this study, we show how echolocating bats recognize ponds or other water bodies that are crucial for foraging, drinking and orientation. With wild bats of 15 different species (seven genera from three phylogenetically distant, large bat families), we found that bats perceived any extended, echo-acoustically smooth surface to be water, even in the presence of conflicting information from other sensory modalities. In addition, naive juvenile bats that had never before encountered a water body showed spontaneous drinking responses from smooth plates. This provides the first evidence for innate recognition of a habitat cue in a mammal.

• youtu.be / The acoustic mirror - How bats water surfaces
• youtu.be / Der akustische Spiegel - Wie Fledermäuse Wasserflä