Dynamic Echo Information Guides Flight in the Big Brown Bat.

ABSTRACT: Animals rely on sensory feedback from their environment to guide locomotion. For instance, visually guided animals use patterns of optic flow to control their velocity and to estimate their distance to objects (e.g., Srinivasan et al., 1991, 1996). In this study, we investigated how acoustic information guides locomotion of animals that use hearing as a primary sensory modality to orient and navigate in the dark, where visual information is unavailable. We studied flight and echolocation behaviors of big brown bats as they flew under infrared illumination through a corridor with walls constructed from a series of individual vertical wooden poles. The spacing between poles on opposite walls of the corridor was experimentally manipulated to create dense/sparse and balanced/imbalanced spatial

SUBMITTER: Warnecke M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4843091 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature