The first bat-wearable microphone is helping biologists study the bats’ good safety record at avoiding collisions in rush hour air.
On summer evenings, in around a minute, some 2,000 greater mouse-tailed bats can crowd out of a cave opening only about three meters square in Israel’s Hula Valley, says neuroecologist Yossi Yovel of Tel Aviv University. From a distance, their emergence looks like “a plume of smoke,” he says.
He and colleagues have now studied the echolocation chirps that let Rhinopoma microphyllum bats detect obstacles, including each other. In the crowded flight, signals from one bat often partially mask a neighbor’s, the researchers report in in the April 8