It takes a village to teach a bat how to communicate. Baby Egyptian fruit bats learn calls from their mothers, but research now shows that they can learn new dialects, or the pitch of their vocalizations, from the colony members around them.
Learning to communicate by repeating the noises that others make is something only a few mammal groups—including humans, whales and dolphins—are known to do. Researchers call this vocal learning, and it’s something that they’re starting to study in bats. Findings published on October 31 in PLOS Biology1 show that bats can also pick things up from the group around them, a process that the authors dub crowd vocal learning.
Bats are becoming the best organism to use in studies of how mammals learn to vocalize, because they’re more easily manipulated in the lab than whales or dolphins. The latest research underscores their importance, says neuroscientist Michael Yartsev of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the work.
Read more at Scientific American
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