Bats use predictive strategies to track moving auditory objects

Abstract

Big brown bats rely on acoustic information from the echoes of their own vocalizations to hunt insects in flight. Unlike many predators that use vision as their primary sensory system, bats compute the 3D position of insect prey from discrete echo snapshots, which yield interrupted sensory information about the target trajectory. Furthermore, this information may be further diminished by clutter in the environment and erratic flight maneuvers of prey. The question arises about the strategies employed by bats to successfully track and intercept their prey. We devised an ethologically inspired behavioral paradigm to directly test the hypothesis that echolocating bats build internal prediction models from dynamic acoustic information to anticipate the future location of moving auditory targets. Collectively, our results demonstrate that the echolocating big brown bat integrates acoustic snapshots over time to build prediction models of a moving auditory target’s trajectory and enables prey capture under conditions of uncertainty. Furthermore, we build on past work to propose a new model that describes bat flight trajectories of bats employing predictive strategies.