Back to Search
Start Over
Echo interval and not echo intensity drives bat flight behavior in structured corridors
- Source :
- The Journal of experimental biology. 221(Pt 24)
- Publication Year :
- 2018
-
Abstract
- To navigate in the natural environment, animals must adapt their locomotion in response to environmental stimuli. The echolocating bat relies on auditory processing of echo returns to represent its surroundings. Recent studies have shown that echo flow patterns influence bat navigation, but the acoustic basis for flight path selection remains unknown. To investigate this problem, we released bats in a flight corridor with walls constructed of adjacent individual wooden poles, which returned cascades of echoes to the flying bat. We manipulated the spacing and echo strength of the poles comprising each corridor side, and predicted that bats would adapt their flight paths to deviate toward the corridor side returning weaker echo cascades. Our results show that the bat's trajectory through the corridor was not affected by the intensity of echo cascades. Instead, bats deviated toward the corridor wall with more sparsely spaced, highly reflective poles, suggesting that pole spacing, rather than echo intensity, influenced bat flight path selection. This result motivated investigation of the neural processing of echo cascades: We measured local evoked auditory responses in the bat inferior colliculus to echo playback recordings from corridor walls constructed of sparsely and densely spaced poles. We predicted that evoked neural responses would be discretely modulated by temporally distinct echoes recorded from the sparsely spaced pole corridor wall, but not by echoes from the more densely spaced corridor wall. The data confirm this prediction and suggest that the bat's temporal resolution of echo cascades may drive its flight behavior in the corridor.
- Subjects :
- 0301 basic medicine
Inferior colliculus
Male
Physiology
Acoustics
Human echolocation
Aquatic Science
Environment
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Chiroptera
Animals
Molecular Biology
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Echo (computing)
Inferior Colliculi
Interval (music)
030104 developmental biology
Insect Science
Temporal resolution
Echolocation
Flight, Animal
Predatory Behavior
Trajectory
Evoked Potentials, Auditory
Animal Science and Zoology
Female
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Bat flight
Geology
Echo intensity
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14779145
- Volume :
- 221
- Issue :
- Pt 24
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- The Journal of experimental biology
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....fd6d463973de1236da4bf3e7b182abd8