Bats are some of the most highly specialized mammals to have ever evolved. This includes not only the evolution of active flight, but also their echolocation. This ability requires the bats to produce ...

Learn how echolocation has shaped the skulls of bats that emit high-frequency sounds through their mouths and noses.

Bats can learn to mimic specific sounds, which puts them into an elite group of animals capable of this. Studying how bats can copy noises could help us learn more about humans’ unique capacity for ...

By listening in on their nightly hunts, scientists discovered that small, fringe-lipped bats are unexpectedly able to efficiently take down prey nearly their own size.

It’s now well-established that bats can develop a mental picture of their environment using echolocation. But we’re still figuring out what that means—how bats take the echoes of their own ...

Even in loud settings with tons of different noises, we seem to have a knack for focusing in on the most important sounds, particularly sounds of danger. If we’re anything like bats, it’s because our ...

Bats live in a world of sounds. They use vocalizations both to communicate with their conspecifics and for navigation. For the latter, they emit sounds in the ultrasonic range, which echo and enable ...

Listening for faint rustling noises made by tasty beetles on a quiet day is simple for bats hunting with their exquisitely sensitive hearing. So try imagining what it must be like trying to locate ...

Long-term memory allows not only people to acquire skills that rarely have to be relearned, such as riding a bicycle, but certain bats may also have that capacity. Biologist M. May Dixon of the ...

For two summers in a rugged corner of Idaho’s Pioneer Mountains, the roar of rushing white water filled the air. But where the loud sounds prevailed, only gentle streams flowed by. These phantom ...