Posted on 08/21/2021 3:54:51 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Pups of the greater sac-winged bat develop their vocal skills by babbling in a similar way to human babies — a discovery that could help researchers to explore the underlying neuroscience of how mammals learn to communicate with one another.
“Even though there are millions of years of different evolutionary pathways between bats and humans, it’s astonishing to see such a similar vocal practice behaviour leading to the same result — acquiring a large vocal repertoire,” says Ahana Fernandez, an animal behavioural ecologist at the Berlin Museum of Natural History and a co-author of the study, which was published on 19 August in Science1.
Sat-nav neurons tell bats where to go
Human babies babble to practise speech sounds, which require precise motor control over their voice boxes, research suggests. Young songbirds also babble, but there are very few other recorded examples of babbling behaviour among animals — the bat research is the first to identify baby babble produced by a mammal that isn’t a primate. Like humans, bats need extraordinary control over their vocal apparatus, because they rely on their calls to navigate and find food through echolocation, and to communicate during courtship and mating, says Fernandez.
To understand how greater sac-winged bat (Saccopteryx bilineata) pups learn to communicate, Fernandez and her colleagues recorded 216 babbling bouts in 20 wild bat pups in Costa Rica and Panama. The researchers used ultrasonic sound equipment to capture the individual ‘syllables’ of the pups’ high-pitched squeals, and identified most of the 25 different syllables heard in the vocal repertoire of adult bats.
The team converted these audio snippets into images called spectrograms that show the pitch and intensity of the sound over time.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
probably saying we’re all gonna die due to the kung flu...
Aww. He’s kinda cute.
My mom used to say God made all babies cute so they would be taken care of.
Uh... don’t virtually all animals, and particularly mammals, vocalize from a very early age?
Had a bat get inside the house one night. The little fella caused a massive case of domestic intranquility!!!!
I would phrase it slightly differently.We perceived babies to be cute so they will be taken care of.
Ever hear a rat make the sound of a babies cry? It’s uncanny. And unnerving.
I wouldn’t.
Sooooo cute
Bats are just plain weird.
I lived in Gainesville, FL where the Luby Bat Institute has a big USF bat research facility underground in the limestone caves there. They used to open it to the public once a year and I was fortunate enough to go.
Luby refers to the Luis Bacardi family, of rum fame, who had bats in their first distillery in Cuba and saw bats as lucky. The bat is the Bacardi symbol, and the Barcardi family have contributed greatly to bat research. This is a great thing, because bats, creepy as they are, are important critters.
The bat caves and above ground “aviaries” had everything from the huge fruit-eating bats of South America to tiny little things that you would barely notice.
Incidentally one of the big attractions of Gainesville was the UF bat house, where both locals and tourists would gather to watch the bats going out for the evening mosquito hunting, Go bats!
"My mom used to say God made all babies cute so they would be taken care of."
It's not just humans. Most babies have big heads, big eyes and a tiny nose. And many animals -- humans among them -- are hard-wired to be kindly disposed toward critters with big heads, big eyes and small noses. That's why you'll sometimes hear stories of a cat nursing puppies or a cow nursing a colt.
"... [B]ats, creepy as they are, are important critters...."
Without bats there'd be no tequila. Or bananas. They're the primary pollinater of more than 500 species of flowering plant (including agave) and 300 species of fruit (including bananas, which, technically, are a berry).
Bats are one of the coolest of animals, IMHO second only to the octopodiformes (octopus, squid & cuttlefish), They're the only mammal that learned to fly (without mechanical help). Specialization is always a two-edged sword and they made YUGE concessions en route to gaining the ability to fly. So they're painted into a very small corner and only can thrive under a narrow set of conditions. Plucky little buggers.
Bats are indeed a unique animal. They’re only flying mammal. Most summer nights a pair of them come to my backyard and swoop and dive after bugs.
They’re amazing to watch.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.