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Why bats fly into walls

Bats excel in acoustic perception and detect objects as tiny as mosquitoes using sound waves. Echolocation permits them to calculate the three-dimensional location of both small and large objects, perceiving their shape, ...

Vampire bats social distance when they get sick

A new paper in Behavioral Ecology, published by Oxford University Press, finds that wild vampire bats that are sick spend less time near others from their community, which slows how quickly a disease will spread. The research ...

DNA in fringe-lipped bat poop reveals unexpected eating habits

Poop is full of secrets. For scientists, digging into feces provides insights into animal diets and is particularly useful for understanding nocturnal or rare species. When animals eat, prey DNA travels all the way through ...

What did the katydids do when picking up bat sounds?

Ecosystems can be incredibly complex, with many interacting species. In many habitats, predators shape they behavior of prey and prey shape the behavior of predators. This paper provides a detailed look at the predator-prey ...

Mother bats use baby talk to communicate with their pups

When talking to babies, humans slow down their speech, raise their pitch and change the "color" of their voice. This 'baby talk,' as people know it, increases the infant's attention and facilitates language learning. Among ...

Researchers identify evolutionary origins of SARS-CoV-2

By reconstructing the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, an international research team of Chinese, European, and U.S. scientists has discovered that the lineage that ...

DNA helps conservation of elusive tequila bat

Scientists studying the near-threatened tequila bat, best known for its vital role in pollinating the Blue Agave plant from which the drink of the same name is made from, have analyzed its DNA to help inform conservationists ...

A new social role for echolocation in bats that hunt together

Searching for food at night can be tricky. To find prey in the dark, bats use echolocation, their "sixth sense." But to find food faster, some species, like Molossus molossus, may search within hearing distance of their echolocating ...

Eavesdropping crickets drop from the sky to evade capture by bats

Researchers have uncovered the highly efficient strategy used by a group of crickets to distinguish the calls of predatory bats from the incessant noises of the nocturnal jungle. The findings, led by scientists at the Universities ...

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