Abstract
Each animal population has its own acoustic signature which facilitates identification, communication and reproduction. The sonar signals of bats can convey social information, such as species identity and contextual information. The goal of this study was to determine whether bats adjust their echolocation call structures to mutually recognize and communicate when they encounter the bats from different colonies. We used the intermediate leaf-nosed bats (Hipposideros larvatus) as a case study to investigate the variations of echolocation calls when bats from one colony were introduced singly into the home cage of a new colony or two bats from different colonies were cohabitated together for one month. Our experiments showed that the single bat individual altered its peak frequency of echolocation calls to approach the call of new colony members and two bats from different colonies adjusted their call frequencies toward each other to a similar frequency after being chronically cohabitated. These results indicate that the ‘compromise’ in echolocation calls might be used to ensure effective mutual communication among bats.
Highlights
Communication behavior of animals is essential for the identification, breeding, formation, and maintenance of social relationships
Our results indicate that echolocation calls of H. larvatus possess high plasticity, lending support to previous studies that bats alter their echolocation calls in relation to their surroundings and permit the task that they are performing to function efficiently under different contexts [26,29,32,33]
Our findings offer strong evidence that bats adjusted their echolocation call structures to that of the residents after a single individual entered a new colony
Summary
Communication behavior of animals is essential for the identification (including individual or population identification, and social class identification), breeding, formation, and maintenance of social relationships. Auditory communication may be employed over a range of distances and is useful when vision is impaired [1]. Animals always possess their private acoustic signature, and their auditory systems appear to be specially attuned for hearing conspecific acoustical signals [2]. Calls are extremely important for survival of the bats that belong to the order Chiroptera and consist of approximately 1200 living species [3]. Seventeen of the eighteen chiropteran families are microchiropteran, which possess the ability to laryngeal echolocate, and this ability allows them to engage many activities that other vertebrates perform visually [4,5]. Echolocating bats collect information of their surroundings based on the differences between what they
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