Chatty Bats or Batty Chats?
(Photo: Michal Samuni-Blank)
Researches recently figured out a way to listen better to what bats are saying. For a long time, they thought that all bat chatter was just general, collective, and random noise.
Neuroecologist Yossi Yovel and his colleagues recorded the sounds of a group of Egyptian fruit bats, and fed it into an algorithm designed to recognize human voices. They analyzed video of the bats to see if they could match up certain noises to certain behaviors, in a sort of bat Rosetta stone attempt.
What the discovered was that far from being random, bats had specific sounds that meant specific things to their roost-mates. Like humans, the bats were talking about food, getting a comfy bed position, finding a mate, and getting annoyed when someone was being pushy or getting to close. Just like humans, they took different tones with different individual bats in their life negotiations.
The current thinking in science is that only humans, dolphins, and a handful of other species communicate in a way that addresses individuals — but just like these researchers showed that assumption to be false by adding bats to the lists, it’s likely that the better we get at listening closely and to subtleties, the more specialized and individualized communication we as humans will be able to perceive.
These chatty bats illustrate that perception is everything — until the researchers were able to find a way to perceive what the bats were doing (by recording, slowing it down, analyzing it with software), they could not understand the communication. It also illustrates the power of assumption and how often humans assume that nothing is happening simply because they cannot perceive it, or they believe that it must be a certain way. Taking a different perspective can open up a whole new world!
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