\n<\/p>\n
Bats are impressive navigators. Like so many mini submarines equipped with sonar, they deftly navigate dark forests and caves by listening for the echoes of their own calls. But how bats can tell which echo to follow while flitting around in a sea of overlapping and competing signals pinging off the myriad surfaces in their environments has been a mystery\u2014until now.<\/p>\n
In a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers lay out evidence that bats find their way by listening to how their own movement changes sounds.<\/p>\n
Imagine being at a party with hundreds or even thousands of people all talking at once; it\u2019s difficult to make out a single speaker, explains Marc Holderied, a professor of sensory biology at the University of Bristol in England and an author of the study. That\u2019s comparable to what a bat may be dealing with as the animal zooms around a dense forest\u2014a chaotic environment that can make it hard to echolocate.<\/p>\n
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To solve this problem, the animals appear to rely on Doppler shift, or how a sound\u2019s pitch changes as a bat travels.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs the bat is moving,\u201d Holderied says, \u201cthis Doppler shift, in this complex echo of thousands of reflectors, carries information.\u201d<\/p>\n
How the team reached that conclusion is an impressive and strange tale. Holderied and his colleagues observed wild pipistrelle bats using a contraption that they dubbed the \u201cbat accelerator.\u201d The machine is basically an eight-meter tunnel of treadmills covered in plastic leaves\u2014about 8,000 of them all stapled on by hand, explains Athia Haron, a medical engineering research associate at the University of Manchester in England and a study co-author.<\/p>\n
The researchers theorized that if bats picked up on the Doppler effect, then the direction that the foliage treadmill was moving in would affect how fast the animals flew.<\/p>\n
When the treadmill moved in the direction of the bats\u2019 flight, the critters sped up. When the foliage appeared to come toward them, however, they slowed down. \u201cWe tricked them into thinking that their speed is different,\u201d Holderied says.<\/p>\n
The results suggest the bats take the Doppler effect into account as they fly and use it to control their speed.<\/p>\n
Researchers already knew of some bat species that are so-called Doppler specialists, Holderied says, but pipistrelle bats aren\u2019t among them. The new findings indicate that the Doppler effect is used by bats that aren\u2019t Doppler specialists.<\/p>\n
And the bizarre experiment could help engineers enhance navigation systems for drones or self-driving cars, Haron says\u2014something she has already begun to explore. \u201cIf that pans out, that would benefit a lot of navigation systems that fail in these kinds of cluttered environments,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
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