Cannot see you but can hear you: vocal identity recognition in microbats

Identity recognition is one of the most critical social behaviours in a variety of animal species. Microchiropteran bats present a special use case of acoustic communication in the dark. These bats use echolocation pulses for navigating, foraging, and communicating; however, increasing evidence sugg...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xiong GUO, Bo LUO, Ying LIU, Ting-Lei JIANG, Jiang FENG
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Science Press, PR China 2015-09-01
Series:Zoological Research
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.zoores.ac.cn/EN/abstract/abstract3665.shtml
Description
Summary:Identity recognition is one of the most critical social behaviours in a variety of animal species. Microchiropteran bats present a special use case of acoustic communication in the dark. These bats use echolocation pulses for navigating, foraging, and communicating; however, increasing evidence suggests that echolocation pulses also serve as a means of social communication. Compared with echolocation signals, communication calls in bats have rather complex structures and differ substantially by social context. Bat acoustic signals vary broadly in spectrotemporal space among individuals, sexes, colonies and species. This type of information can be gathered from families of vocalizations based on voice characteristics. In this review we summarize the current studies regarding vocal identity recognition in microbats. We also provide recommendations and directions for further work.
ISSN:2095-8137
2095-8137