Echolocation by insect-eating bats

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.

• 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.

• Bats

  Most bats find their way and catch prey by listening to the echoes of their own calls

• Echolocation

  There is no such thing as "the" bat call. A bat hunting in open air uses long narrow calls that reach a long way; a bat hunting among leaves uses short broad ones that place things precisely and not far.

• Echolocation

  A horseshoe bat’s hearing is tuned to one narrow band, and its own flight speed would shift the echo out of it. So the bat lowers the pitch of its call in flight by exactly the right amount.

• Animal hearing

  Low sounds carry much further than high ones through air, vegetation and water. That physical fact, more than anything about the animals, explains who communicates at long range and who does not.