Lower your pitch please!
Pale spear nosed bats. Apparently, they are smart, friendly, and like banana! Photo by Lutz Wiegrebe/Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a good week! I have been very busy with my schoolwork and reading articles about bats.

Bats are very interesting creatures. One thing that’s interesting about them is their ability to mimic specific sounds. A lot of animals aren’t able to do this; however, humans, some birds, seals, dolphins, whales, elephants, and bats can. In order to test if bats were able to do this, scientists took six adult spear-nosed bats and trained them to imitate each other in order to get food.

For the experiment the scientists recorded what sounds the bats made, and then played them back to the bats at a lower pitch. Within a month, all of the bats were able to lower the frequency of their calls to imitate the frequency played at them. This information will help scientists figure out how humans were able to learn how to imitate different sounds in order to talk to one and other. The next step of the project is to try and get bats to imitate more complicated patterns.

If you want to read more about this topic you can do so here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Copyright © 2021 Bat Conservation & Rescue of Virginia. All rights reserved.