Dynamics of the echolocation beam during prey pursuit in aerial hawking bats

@article{Jakobsen2015DynamicsOT,
  title={Dynamics of the echolocation beam during prey pursuit in aerial hawking bats},
  author={Lasse Jakobsen and Mads Nedergaard Olsen and Annemarie Surlykke},
  journal={Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},
  year={2015},
  volume={112},
  pages={8118 - 8123},
  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:4990602}
}
The results show that emballonurid bats ensonify a wide area during pursuit, not by broadening the beam but by emitting high-intensity calls throughout pursuit, and hypothesize that maintaining a broad acoustic field of view is crucial for all echolocators hunting moving prey.
View on NAS
pnas.org
32 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
1
Background Citations
11
Methods Citations
2
Results Citations
1

Figures and Tables from this paper

32 Citations

Hunting bats adjust their echolocation to receive weak prey echoes for clutter reduction

Bat-borne tags reveal faint echoes and fast sensorimotor responses that reduce acoustic clutter in complex foraging habitats. How animals extract information from their surroundings to guide motor…

Sonar beam dynamics in leaf-nosed bats

How nose-emitting bats, Phyllostomus discolor, adjust their sonar beam to object distance is reported, showing that the height and width of the bats sonar beams varies even within each animal and this variation is unrelated to changes in call level or spectral content.

Coordinated Control of Acoustical Field of View and Flight in Three-Dimensional Space for Consecutive Capture by Echolocating Bats during Natural Foraging

The results showed that when the bats successively captured multiple airborne insects in short time intervals, they maintained not only the immediate prey but also the subsequent one simultaneously within the beam widths of the emitted pulses in both horizontal and vertical planes before capturing the immediate one.

Big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) emit intense search calls and fly in stereotyped flight paths as they forage in the wild

Field recordings of Eptesicus fuscus reveal highly intense source levels and stereotypic flight behaviour, potentially as a strategy to optimize foraging efficiency by minimizing sensory processing load.

Echolocating bats rapidly adjust their mouth gape to control spatial acquisition when scanning a target

Bats actively and rapidly control their echolocation vertical beam width by modifying their mouth gape, and it is hypothesized that narrowing their vertical beam narrows the zone of ensonification when estimating the elevation of a target.

Syddansk Universitet Big brown bats ( Eptesicus fuscus ) emit intense search calls and fly in stereotyped flight paths as they forage in the wild Hulgard

It is observed that E. fuscus appear to follow stereotypic flight paths, and proposed that this could be a strategy to optimize foraging efficiency by minimizing the sensory load for orientation and therefore allocate echo processing resources to prey.

Echolocating Daubenton's bats are resilient to broadband, ultrasonic masking noise during active target approaches.

Bats with no spectral, spatial or temporal release from masking noise, defend a certain ENR via a Lombard effect are concluded to be very resilient to masking even when they cannot avoid it spectrally, spatially or temporally.

A dynamic ultrasonic emitter inspired by horseshoe bat noseleaves

It was found that an elliptical sound outlet with rotating baffles that were attached along the direction of the major axis can be well suited for this purpose and concave baffle shapes were found to produce strongly time-dependent devices characteristics that could reach a root-mean-square-difference between beampatterns within a rotation angle of 10°.

Auditory opportunity and visual constraint enabled the evolution of echolocation in bats

It is shown that bats’ common ancestor had eyes too small to allow for successful aerial hawking of flying insects at night, but an auditory brain design sufficient to afford echolocation, and that non-echolocating, phytophagous pteropodid bats may retain some of the necessary foundations for biosonar.

Dynamic Emission Baffle Inspired by Horseshoe Bat Noseleaves

A data acquisition and instrument control system has been developed and integrated with transducers to characterize the dynamic emission system acoustically as well as actuators for recreating the dynamics of the horseshoe bat noseleaf.

30 References

Echolocating Bats Cry Out Loud to Detect Their Prey

It is concluded that for bats with similar hunting habits, prey detection range represents a unifying constraint on the emitted intensity largely independent of call shape, body size, and close phylogenetic relationships.

Vespertilionid bats control the width of their biosonar sound beam dynamically during prey pursuit

Directionality is proposed as an explanation for the frequency decrease observed in the buzz of aerial hawking vespertilionid bats and dynamic control of beam width in both species is demonstrated.

An Aerial-Hawking Bat Uses Stealth Echolocation to Counter Moth Hearing

Adaptive beam-width control of echolocation sounds by CF–FM bats, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum nippon, during prey-capture flight

Findings indicate that bats actively adjust their beam width to retain the moving target within a spatial echolocation window during the final capture stages.

Range-dependent flexibility in the acoustic field of view of echolocating porpoises (Phocoena phocoena)

It is shown that, like some bats, harbour porpoises can broaden their biosonar beam during the terminal phase of attack but, unlike bats, maintain the ability to change beamwidth within this phase.

How Some Insects Detect and Avoid Being Eaten by Bats: Tactics and Countertactics of Prey and Predator

The aim with this review is to present the complex interactions between echolocating bats and insects with bat-detecting ears and show how these interactions may be advantageous for predator or prey.

How the bat got its buzz

It is proposed that buzz II represents a countermeasure against the evasive flight of eared prey in the evolutionary arms-race that saw the independent evolution of bat-detecting ears in various groups of night-flying insects.

Acoustic imaging in bat sonar: Echolocation signals and the evolution of echolocation

SummaryEcholocating bats behave as though they perceive the crosscorrelation functions between their sonar transmissions and echoes as images of targets, at least with respect to perception of target…

Echolocation calls in Central American emballonurid bats: signal design and call frequency alternation

A model of how frequency alternation could increase the maximum detection distance of obstacles by marking search calls with different frequencies is proposed and discussed, including species identification and partitioning of acoustic channels.

Echolocation and pursuit of prey by bats.

Echolocating bats use different information-gathering strategies for hunting prey in open, uncluttered environments, in relatively open environments with some obstacles, and in densely cluttered…