Bats shift shrieks to avoid jamming

Flying in silence: Echolocating bats cease vocalizing to avoid sonar jamming.

Although it has been recognized that echolocating bats may experience jamming from the signals of conspecifics, research on this problem has focused exclusively on time-frequency adjustments in the emitted signals to minimize interference. Here, we report a surprising new strategy used by bats to avoid interference, namely silence. In a quantitative study of flight and vocal behavior of the big...

Erratum Foraging bats avoid noise

Dynamics of jamming avoidance in echolocating bats.

Animals using active sensing systems such as echolocation or electrolocation may experience interference from the signals of neighbouring conspecifics, which can be offset by a jamming avoidance response (JAR). Here, we report JAR in one echolocating bat (Tadarida teniotis: Molossidae) but not in another (Taphozous perforatus: Emballonuridae) when both flew and foraged with conspecifics. In T. ...

On-board recordings reveal no jamming avoidance in wild bats.

Animals often deal with situations in which vast sensory input is received simultaneously. They therefore must possess sophisticated mechanisms to select important input and ignore the rest. In bat echolocation, this problem is at its extreme. Echolocating bats emit sound signals and analyse the returning echoes to sense their environment. Bats from the same species use signals with similar fre...

A Comparative Model of Echolocation Jamming Avoidance Strategies in Bats

Echolocation is a powerful active sensory system, but it is susceptibility to jamming. Jamming occurs when calls of similar frequency, time, and amplitude coincide resulting in misperceptions of the surroundings. One strategy for avoiding jamming found in bats is to lower the emission rate of echolocation calls and follow a neighbor. However, bats are known to move in large groups that do not h...