Study
Echolocation by insect-eating bats
Schnitzler, Hans-Ulrich; Kalko, Elisabeth K. V.
BioScience, 2001
A synthesis relating call design — frequency, bandwidth, duration, repetition rate — to the habitat a bat forages in and the task it faces, across insect-eating bats.
- Studied in
- Chiroptera
- Sample size
- synthesis across insectivorous bat families
Call structure tracks foraging habitat closely. Bats hunting in open air use long, narrowband, low-frequency calls that carry far; bats hunting among vegetation use short, broadband calls that resolve detail but reach only metres. The same species shifts call design as it moves between these situations.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Echolocation call design is best understood as a solution to a perceptual task set by habitat, not as a fixed species trait.
How NatureHQ reads it
The useful idea to take from this is that echolocation involves a real trade-off rather than being simply good or bad. Range and resolution pull against each other, and a bat cannot have both at once. This is why "bats see with sound" is a poor summary: the sensory world available to a bat changes shape depending on which compromise it has currently chosen.
- A review; the underlying data vary greatly in quality between families.
- Strongly biased towards temperate insectivores, which are easiest to record.
- Says little about the many bats that do not eat insects.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Academic book publishersPublished as an academic monograph.
doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0557:ebieb]2.0.co;2
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-09.