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To Scream or to Listen? Prey Detection and Discrimination in Animal-Eating Bats

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Bat Bioacoustics

Part of the book series: Springer Handbook of Auditory Research ((SHAR,volume 54))

Abstract

All animal-eating bats are echolocators, and the vast majority can capture airborne prey (aerial hawking). The literature suggests that >40 % of these same species also take prey from surfaces (substrate gleaning). Innovations in acoustic recording have revealed bats’ high-frequency vocalizations and showed that hawking bats produce calls of greater intensity than calls produced by gleaning bats. In response to bat echolocation calls, many eared insects initiate evasive action, and some tiger moths produce sounds that deter a bat from completing an aerial attack. Bats abort their hawking attacks as a result of having had their echolocation interfered with by the moths’ sounds, by having had previous experience that taught them moths that make sounds tasted bad, or through some combination of the two. Among gleaning bats, the fringe-lipped bat has been well studied with respect to foraging. This bat uses the sexual advertisement calls of male frogs to localize them. Male frogs that produce calls with more complexity are more attractive to female frogs, but are more easily localized by fringe-lipped bats. It had been argued that gleaning bats are unable to locate perched or otherwise substrate-borne prey using echolocation. This is because background echoes were assumed to mask those reflected from prey. Gleaners were believed, instead, to use prey-generated sounds for detection and localization. It is now known that at least one species of bat is able to resolve echoes reflected from large insect prey from the echoes reflected from the vegetation on which the insect is perched.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Corson Hall, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Patricia L. Jones

  2. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Panama

    Rachel A. Page

  3. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, 25 Willcocks Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3B2

    John M. Ratcliffe

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  1. Patricia L. Jones
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  2. Rachel A. Page
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  3. John M. Ratcliffe
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Correspondence to John M. Ratcliffe .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of Western Ontario, LONDON, Ontario, Canada

    M. Brock Fenton

  2. Dept of Physi, David Geffen School of Me, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Alan D Grinnell

  3. Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

    Arthur N. Popper

  4. Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA

    Richard R. Fay

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Jones, P.L., Page, R.A., Ratcliffe, J.M. (2016). To Scream or to Listen? Prey Detection and Discrimination in Animal-Eating Bats. In: Fenton, M., Grinnell, A., Popper, A., Fay, R. (eds) Bat Bioacoustics. Springer Handbook of Auditory Research, vol 54. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3527-7_4

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