From sensory perception to foraging decision making, studying bats in the real world

Bats are the most diverse group of mammals, and many species navigate dozens of kilometres nightly or migrate thousands of kilometres, yet their small size and agility have made them hard to study in the wild. Yossi Yovel presents miniature sensors that GPS-tag small bats while recording their echolocation calls, showing that blindfolded bats build acoustic cognitive maps, modelled with sequence-learning neural networks as self-learned maps. The same approach shows how mother bats help pups acquire navigation and that bats track the time since they last visited a foraging site, opening sensorimotor decision making to study in the real world.