Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 65
BAT DANCE During mating season, a male bat—Hipposideros caffer aka Sundevall’s leaf-nosed bat—shows off his
wing-flapping prowess for a female.
“We have over 1,400 different bat species, and we only have
vocal information—not complete information, but at least
some information on their social communication calls or
songs—for less than 100 species,” Knörnschild said.
Bats are one of the largest and most diverse groups
of mammals. There are bats the size of a bumblebee and
bats that weigh around the same as a small rabbit. Most
bats live in colonies and many of them have incredibly
complex social lives for which good communication is
necessary. Scientists believe many species can sing; some
can recognize each other’s voices; they have dialects; they
can alert others to dangers; and they form intense bonds
with their young.
“We know that mothers use a specialized tone of voice
when they communicate with their pups, like motherese,
what we humans do when we’re cooing at a baby, using this
high pitch,” Knörnschild said. And there’s still so much to
discover. Bats are an ancient group with many phylogenetically distinct species. “They could have come up with different solutions for the same problem,” Knörnschild said.
Once Huó and Naskrecki retrieve the audio and video
recordings from the bat tower, they feed them to the
computer, using a program to transform what sounds to
humans like silence into the hum and buzz of hundreds
of bats, a cacophony of sounds. “We slow it down, then
we look at the spectrogram that shows us the pattern of
these calls,” Naskrecki said. After screening out echolocation calls, which have already been collected in a database,
they look for new patterns, cross-checking the video to
see what the bats were doing when they made this or that
sound. Naskrecki and Huó are trying to build a kind of
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