Bat Landing on the Rewarded Object in Complete Darkness (VIDEO)
Caption
A bat lands on the rewarded object in complete darkness (movie taken in IR). The movie shows that the bat has a general knowledge of the location of the object, but it cannot use echolocation to find the landing platform (white horizontal platform at the center of the black board) or estimate the distance to the object. The bat makes 3 attempts to land, but only lands on the board from which it was difficult for bats to reach the platform. For comparison see supplementary movie 2 which was taken in the light where the bat smoothly lands on the feeding platform at the first attempt. This movie also proves that bats could not rely on vision in the dark condition. The audio in the movie was not recorded in synchrony with the video. Because we did not synchronize audio recordings with the IR video (only with the high speed) we could not provide the accurate audio. We chose to add a representative audio track which was recorded in the same experiment and approximately at the same time order to give the reader a feeling of what clicking sounded like.
Credit
<i>Current Biology</i>, Boonman et al
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