Researchers Find That Bats Can See The Future

Though it’s far from fortune-telling, researchers have found that bats master an aspect of seeing the future: finding prey.

They can calculate where their prey is heading by building predictive models of the potential location of the prey from echoes. This method is so effective that bats can keep track of the prey’s location even when it’s hidden behind obstacles like trees.

Researchers have thoroughly studied predictive modeling of object motion among animals, but the new findings are the first to take the sense of hearing into account. The work can help us better understand animals’ and humans’ auditory guided behavior, including people with vision impairment that use audio cues to locate objects around them.

According to the study’s senior author Cynthia F. Moss, like a tennis player that needs to figure out when and where to hit a ball, bats need to predict when and where it will encounter its prey. She said:

“The insect is flying. The bat is also flying. In this very rapidly changing environment, if the bat were to just rely on the information it got from the most recent echo, it would miss the insect.”

By watching for delays in the echolocation calls, bats can determine the distance between itself and the prey. They then tilt their ears and head to obtain more information. As bats are so good at hunting, researchers thought there’s more to find out about their hunting routine, which is why they created a test environment mimicking their natural hunting environment.

Clarice Anna Diebold, the co-first author of the study, explained that mathematical models were developed to test their data and they had hypotheses for what bats could possibly do. They figured that if bats did not predict the route, they would lag behind their prey with their head movements.

Another co-first author said that the researchers hypothesized that bats derived velocity info from the echo timing to adjust their head aim. When testing the model with their data, the research team saw that it fitted well.

Previously, in the 1980s, there was a study that ruled that bats don’t predict the future position of an insect it’s hunting, but the new findings have disproved this conclusion.

And though the study’s focus is on bats, the findings can apply to other animals as well as vision-impaired humans.

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