On-board recordings reveal no jamming avoidance in wild bats.

ABSTRACT: Animals often deal with situations in which vast sensory input is received simultaneously. They therefore must possess sophisticated mechanisms to select important input and ignore the rest. In bat echolocation, this problem is at its extreme. Echolocating bats emit sound signals and analyse the returning echoes to sense their environment. Bats from the same species use signals with similar frequencies. Nearby bats therefore face the difficulty of distinguishing their own echoes from the signals of other bats, a problem often referred to as jamming. Because bats commonly fly in large groups, jamming might simultaneously occur from numerous directions and at many frequencies. Jamming is a special case of the general phenomenon of sensory segregation. Another well-known example is the human

SUBMITTER: Cvikel N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4262180 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature