Eavesdropping like bats

American scientists have discovered that bats learn to hunt by eavesdropping on information transmitted by ultrasound of the same type.

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The team led by Genevieve Spanjer Wright of the University of Maryland in College Park city trained 12 bats on how to catch the worms hanging from the ceiling.

By constantly changing food positions, they taught bats to actively hunt based on their ability to locate with ultrasound or echo.

After that, they put 22 other bats into the experiment. Of these, 11 fly in the same room with the experienced bats, the rest stay with the untrained children.

The researchers filmed the bats and examined their actions through the captured images. They found that whenever an experienced bat found its prey, it emitted a very high frequency sound and the young bat experienced immediately flying closer. As a result, the bats that fly with the 'elder' know how to catch the worms, while no one flies with the untrained bat to find the 'spoils' they desire.

The study by Wright and colleagues, published in the latest issue of the Animal Behavior Journal, is the first scientific work to show that the species of Eptesicus fuscus can actively access information from copper ultrasound. type to learn experience.

Dr. Marc Holderied, a bat expert at Bristol University (UK), said that many bat species tend to fly in small groups and this is interpreted as social learning . But the study provides convincing evidence that this bat really knows how to look at experienced mates to learn how to find bait.

He also added that 50 million years of evolution have allowed bats to develop ultrasound-capable positioning that humans can imitate if we study the animal's behavior thoroughly.

'In the future, if we teach robots to use echolocation, we need to observe what bats are doing,' he told the BBC.