Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 62
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G O RONGOSA SPECIAL
Since we arrived at the tower during the daylight hours, I had expected
the nocturnal mammals to be asleep. Instead, they were shaking their
wings, flying from one wall or spot on the ceiling to another, swooping
sometimes a bit too close to me for my comfort. But the bats didn’t care
about me; they were cruising for mates. It was mating season, and we
had lucked out to see their mating performances. Huó pointed out that
some females were inspecting the males, checking out their wing flapping prowess.
But Huó and her adviser, the polymath entomologist Piotr Naskrecki,
did not bring me to this colony to view the bats’ seductive dances and their
feats of flight, since those behaviors are already known to scientists. We
were here to decipher what the bats were saying while doing them. Huó
and Naskrecki had set up cameras and audio recorders the night before to
learn more about these bats and try to understand the nature of the calls
they use, listening for signs of meaning.
Scientists have studied echolocation calls in some bat populations
for decades. Echolocation is a kind of sixth sense that allows bats to use
reflected sounds to fly blind and hunt in the dark, a superpower that has
inspired aspects of human technologies such as sonar and new forms of
radar. But we know much less about their social communication, said
Naskrecki, who first became interested in the flying mammals while studying the ways some katydids adapted their morphology to avoid being captured by bats. He realized that bats are similar to primates in their behavior,
and came up with a hypothesis.
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Y ULI A _OGNEVA / S H UT TER STOC K
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