Just published in the journal Current Biology is a study out of Tel Aviv University that recounts this observed behavior in bats, which the authors called the "bag of chips effect."
"When you sit in a dark cinema theater and someone opens a bag of chips, everyone in the theater knows that someone is eating chips and approximately where that someone is," lead researcher Yossi Yovel explained in a statement. "Bats work similarly."
"Chips" for a bat, of course, would be a juicy patch of insects, and the scientists noted that when one bat hit paydirt, other bats close enough by to hear the score converged on the location.
The particular bat the researchers studied was the Rhinopoma microphyllum, otherwise known as the Greater Mouse-tailed bat. The food it chased was typically flying ant queens. That insect can be plentiful but well dispersed, in patches that are tough to find. So the bats' ability to snoop on each others' hunting improves their collective chance of dining well.
Such insect crowd-hunting skills are a beneficial trick for the bats, in light of the fact that while they can hear prey that comes within about 33 feet (10 meters) of them, they can hear one of their pals finding food from an astonishing 328 feet (100 meters) away.
Yovel and his colleagues rigged their study bats with very small, GPS-enabled ultrasonic recorders and then began collecting data.
The process, Yovel said, "allowed us to tap into the bats' sensory acquisition of the world by recording them." The sonar recordings allowed the researchers to be able to tell when the bats were hunting down prey and when they were simply conferring with other bats. "This is almost impossible to do with other animals," Yovel added.
Read more at Discovery News
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