Paying attention to the man behind the curtain: Jim Simmons' contributions to bat echolocation

Abstract

Echolocating big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) perceive their surroundings by broadcasting frequency-modulated (FM) ultrasonic pulses and processing returning echoes. These bats commonly navigate acoustically-cluttered environments, in which each broadcast is followed by multiple echoes at varying time delays and echo amplitudes. The bat must decode these echo cascades in order to create a coherent percept of its surroundings and adapt its flight and echolocation behavior in real time. Jim Simmons’ physiological and behavioral work—which continues to fuel research questions to this day—has significantly helped our understanding of how this decoding might be possible. In this talk, I will revisit some of Jim Simmons’ seminal work that contributed to our understanding of echolocation processing, and describe its influence on new generations of researchers who continue to build on Jim’s important work.