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Journal article

Sensory gaze stabilization in echolocating bats.

  • Eitan O School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel.
  • Kosa G Intelligent Medical Micro/Nano Systems Group, University Hospital of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
  • Yovel Y School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel.
  • 2019-10-17
Published in:
  • Proceedings. Biological sciences. - 2019
active sensing
bats
echolocation
gaze stabilization
sensory perception
tracking
Acoustics
Animals
Chiroptera
Echolocation
Flight, Animal
Sound
English Sensing from a moving platform is challenging for both man-made machines and animals. Animals' heads jitter during movement, so if the sensors they carry are not stabilized, any spatial estimation might be biased. Flying animals, like bats, seriously suffer from this problem because flapping flight induces rapid changes in acceleration which moves the body up and down. For echolocating bats, the problem is crucial. Because they emit a sound to sense the world, an unstable head means sound energy pointed in the wrong direction. It is unknown how bats mitigate this problem. By tracking the head and body of flying fruit bats, we show that they stabilize their heads, accurately maintaining a fixed acoustic-gaze relative to a target. Bats can solve the stabilization task even in complete darkness using only echo-based information. Moreover, the bats point their echolocation beam below the target and not towards it, a strategy that should result in better estimations of target elevation.
Language
  • English
Open access status
bronze
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Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/73559
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