The major mouse tail bats are crawled back
Sahar Hajyahia et al. 2025
Orienting in the darkness of a cave seems like a difficult task. But some bats may have an ingenious solution: use their tails.
Great mouse tail bats (Rhinopoma microphrophyllum) Live in groups within small caves where to fly is challenging, so they hang from the walls of the cave and move more deeply in the one that crawls back. They maneuver in this way in many situations, as in response to the appearance of a predator, or when they want to find a better position in the cave.
The biologist has wondered for a long time if these bats could use their unusually long tails as a “sensor” to navigate inside the caves, so Yossi Yovel at the University of Telviv in Israel and his colleagues designed two experiments to test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7ku1o9zajk
In the first experiment, the researchers recreated a configuration that imitated the interior of a cave, creating a maze with obstacles similar to the unequal and rocky terrain that bats would naturally find. The team measured how long the bats have to climb the wall while dragging back, and how gently they can do it, first naturally and then with their anesthetized tails.
The bats moved their queues from one place to another to feel the obstacles and find their way through the labyrinth. But when the investigators anesthetized the classes of the bats, the flying mammals browsed with less soft and around 10 percent slower. However, they still achieved suggestions that they also use other parts of the body to feel obstacles. “When you walk back, you can still feel with your body and legs,” says Yovel. “It is clear that they can do it. But there was a significant reduction in performance.”
In the second experiment, the researchers designed a labyrinth in the form of and that presented two runners with different textures grown that bats could feel and choose between. They used texture differences between the two runners to teach bats that a corridor led to a reward, while the other does not. Just although the textural differentials were subtle, a corridor had grilles every 1.5 centimeters and one had grilles every 1 cm, animals could distinguish between them.
While other bat species have long lines, researchers say that this is so far the only one who knows to find their way in the dark using this distinctive strategy. “I don’t think this is the general for bats with long queues,” says Yovel. But “until we try the other bats, we really don’t know.”
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