Onboard recordings reveal how bats maneuver under severe acoustic interference.

Echolocating bats rely on active acoustic sensing to perceive their environment. When multiple bats fly together, echolocating simultaneously, the calls emitted by nearby conspecifics could interfere with and mask the echoes necessary for orientation. Nowhere is this impairment of sensing more dramatic than when thousands of bats emerge from a cave at the same time.

Acoustic cognitive map-based navigation in echolocating bats.

Bats are known for their ability to use echolocation for obstacle avoidance and orientation. However, the extent to which bats utilize their highly local and directional echolocation for kilometer-scale navigation is unknown. In this study, we translocated wild Kuhl's pipistrelle bats and tracked their homing abilities while manipulating their visual, magnetic, and olfactory sensing and accurately tracked them using a new reverse GPS system.

The sociality of sleep in animal groups.

Group-living animals sleep together, yet most research treats sleep as an individual process. Here, we argue that social interactions during the sleep period contribute in important, but largely overlooked, ways to animal groups' social dynamics, while patterns of social interaction and the structure of social connections within animal groups play important, but poorly understood, roles in shaping sleep behavior. Leveraging field-appropriate methods, such as direct and video-based observation, and increasingly common on-animal motion sensors (e.

A social foraging trade-off in echolocating bats reveals that they benefit from some conspecifics but are impaired when many are around.

Social foraging is very common in the animal kingdom. Numerous studies have documented collective foraging in various species and many reported the attraction of various species to foraging conspecifics. It is nonetheless difficult to quantify the benefits and costs of collective foraging, especially in the wild.

Time-mapping and future-oriented behavior in free-ranging wild fruit bats.

Episodic memory and mental time travel have been viewed as uniquely human traits. This view began to shift with the development of behavioral criteria to assess what is referred to as "episodic-like memory" in animals. Key findings have ranged from evidence of what-where-when memory in scrub-jays, rats, and bees; through decision-making that impacts future foraging in frugivorous primates; to evidence of planning based on future needs in scrub-jays and tool use planning in great apes.

What determines the information update rate in echolocating bats.

The rate of sensory update is one of the most important parameters of any sensory system. The acquisition rate of most sensory systems is fixed and has been optimized by evolution to the needs of the animal. Echolocating bats have the ability to adjust their sensory update rate which is determined by the intervals between emissions - the inter-pulse intervals (IPI).

An artificial neural network explains how bats might use vision for navigation.

Animals navigate using various sensory information to guide their movement. Miniature tracking devices now allow documenting animals' routes with high accuracy. Despite this detailed description of animal movement, how animals translate sensory information to movement is poorly understood.

Mother bats facilitate pup navigation learning.

Learning where to forage and how to navigate to foraging sites are among the most essential skills that infants must acquire. How they do so is poorly understood. Numerous bat species carry their young in flight while foraging.

Fruit bats adjust their foraging strategies to urban environments to diversify their diet.

Background: Urbanization is one of the most influential processes on our globe, putting a great number of species under threat. Some species learn to cope with urbanization, and a few even benefit from it, but we are only starting to understand how they do so. In this study, we GPS tracked Egyptian fruit bats from urban and rural populations to compare their movement and foraging in urban and rural environments.

Fireflies produce ultrasonic clicks during flight as a potential aposematic anti-bat signal.

Fireflies are known for emitting light signals for intraspecific communication. However, in doing so, they reveal themselves to many potential nocturnal predators from a large distance. Therefore, many fireflies evolved unpalatable compounds and probably use their light signals as anti-predator aposematic signals.

Echolocating bats can adjust sensory acquisition based on internal cues.

Background: Sensory systems acquire both external and internal information to guide behavior. Adjustments based on external input are much better documented and understood than internal-based sensory adaptations. When external input is not available, idiothetic-internal-cues become crucial for guiding behavior.

Echolocating bats detect but misperceive a multidimensional incongruent acoustic stimulus.

Coherent perception relies on integrating multiple dimensions of a sensory modality, for example, color and shape in vision. We reveal how different acoustic dimensions, specifically echo intensity and sonar aperture (or width), are important for correct perception by echolocating bats. We flew bats down a corridor blocked by objects with different intensity-aperture combinations.

Reinforcement Learning Enables Resource Partitioning in Foraging Bats.

Every evening, from late spring to mid-summer, tens of thousands of hungry lactating female lesser long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) emerge from their roost and navigate over the Sonoran Desert, seeking for nectar and pollen [1, 2]. The bats roost in a huge maternal colony that is far from the foraging grounds but allows their pups to thermoregulate [3] while the mothers are foraging. Thus, the mothers have to fly tens of kilometers to the foraging sites-fields with thousands of Saguaro cacti [4, 5].

The ontogeny of a mammalian cognitive map in the real world.

How animals navigate over large-scale environments remains a riddle. Specifically, it is debated whether animals have cognitive maps. The hallmark of map-based navigation is the ability to perform shortcuts, i.

Plants' ability to sense and respond to airborne sound is likely to be adaptive: reply to comment by Pyke et al.

Ecol. Lett. 22, 2019, 1483 demonstrated, for the first time, a rapid response of a plant to the airborne sounds of pollinators.

Flowers respond to pollinator sound within minutes by increasing nectar sugar concentration.

Can plants sense natural airborne sounds and respond to them rapidly? We show that Oenothera drummondii flowers, exposed to playback sound of a flying bee or to synthetic sound signals at similar frequencies, produce sweeter nectar within 3 min, potentially increasing the chances of cross pollination. We found that the flowers vibrated mechanically in response to these sounds, suggesting a plausible mechanism where the flower serves as an auditory sensory organ. Both the vibration and the nectar response were frequency-specific: the flowers responded and vibrated to pollinator sounds, but not to higher frequency sound.

Interspecific variation in the relationship between clutch size, laying date and intensity of urbanization in four species of hole-nesting birds.

The increase in size of human populations in urban and agricultural areas has resulted in considerable habitat conversion globally. Such anthropogenic areas have specific environmental characteristics, which influence the physiology, life history, and population dynamics of plants and animals. For example, the date of bud burst is advanced in urban compared to nearby natural areas.