Bats sing sweet love songs to each other in the night.
University of Texas at Austin
(http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/08/25/bat_love_songs/)

In Austin Texas, researchers at Texas A&M university are interested in how male bats attract female bats at night. In an attempt to pick up lady bats in their nightly outings, researchers have found that male bats have a complex repertoire of vocal love songs they produce. These love songs have recently been decoded by the researchers.

Three years of analyzing Mexican free-tailed bat recordings has revealed that male bats sing with discernible syllables and phrases to attract females, and also to warn other male bats to stay away.

Neurobiologist George Pollak, biologists Kirsten Bohn and Mike Smotherman, and Barbara Schmidt-French of Bat Conservation International have been working with the bats. "I am amazed at the richness of the vocal repertoire that bats use for social communication," says Pollak. "Their courtship songs are perhaps the most surprising, since each song is complex and structured."

The bats use several types of unique syllables, or sounds, and they combine these syllables in specific ways to make three types of phrases: a chirp, a buzz or a trill. The males use different combinations of the three during the mating process.

These sounds are incredibly difficult for the human ear to pick up as the bats communicate at a very high frequency. The sounds are used in a very specific way, arranging syllables into patterns making up songs. Many of the bats the researchers studied were found living in downtown Austin Texas beneath Ann Richards Bridge and Kyle Field in College Station. There are over an estimated 1 million bats at both of the locations combined.

"We compared the recordings made by bats in Austin to those at Kyle Field, and we discovered they were almost exactly the same," says Bohn. "The bats in both places use the same 'words' in their love phrases."

Their results are surprising because generally speaking mammals don’t have rules to their communication patterns. Birds are well known for having complex communication patters and so are whales. This new information shows that bats are capable of unique vocalizations between other members of their species. Pollak adds, "Who would have thought that bats could have one of the most sophisticated and rich vocal repertoires for communications of all animals?"

Posted By "Nicole Breivogel" (3)