Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 67
ZO OLOGY
I expected the
nocturnal
mammals to be
asleep. Instead,
they were
swooping a bit too
close for comfort.
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GORONGOSA SPECIAL
bat, no doubt) who was trying to feed it mysterious foods. Huó was worried
because this wasn’t the first bat they had captured, but at least the eighth,
and two of them had gotten so stressed out that they’d died. After feeding it, she planned to release it into the bat room, a small room with walls
painted black and a fake tree or two, as well as a cozy fake cave to help the
bat get comfortable. Huó would set up devices to record him all night and
hope it would call out—perhaps a kind of distress call—so she could add
the call to the dictionary.
Distress calls are one of the most universal bat social calls, said neuroethologist Angie Salles, who runs a lab studying social communication
in bats at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “If you play back the distress
calls, you usually attract bats to the area where you’re playing those back,
and it doesn’t necessarily attract only that species of bat,” she said.
Salles conducts similar experiments at her bat lab, but with slightly different goals. She uses captive colonies and sometimes attaches little electrodes to their heads to measure variations in their brain activity depending on their behavior or when they are exposed to different sounds. She’s
especially interested in how bats interpret these auditory communications
in different contexts. “Let’s say a bat is engaged in a fight with another
bat,” she said. “Maybe a distress call will have a more salient response than
if the bat is doing something else.” She hopes to gather ideas about how
brains (the bats’ but also human, yours and mine) process the sounds that
become language.
The morning after I watched Huó try to feed the bat, I went back to the
lab to check on it. Huó said it was doing fine. “He’s eating OK and I saw him
hunting last night,” she said. It had hunted some of the crickets and moths
she had thoughtfully planted in its room. We found it resting upside down
(naturally) on a branch. In the room there was another recorder, poised to
capture its sounds and songs, and if the bat lived through this ordeal, he
would go back to his colony in a day or two.
Naskrecki said his goal is to create a captive colony in the bat room
and compare it to roosting spots in the wild. (They don’t plan to maintain
a permanent captive colony of bats—only to keep and grow one for the
duration of Huó’s master’s project.) The researchers will then have a listening post to hear what bats say when they are content, sending out messages of social cohesion; when there’s a threat and they want to attack or
flee; or when they woo their sweethearts or coo to their young. Inaudible
to humans, the lab will be alive with the sound of bat talk for scholars to
decipher and interpret.
Jori Lewis writes about the environment and agriculture mostly from the Global
South. In 2018, she received the Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction for her new book,
Slaves for Peanuts. She is also a contributing editor with Adi Magazine, a literary magazine
covering global politics. She splits her time between Illinois and Dakar, Senegal.
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