Bats are flying mammals you might spot and — rarely — hear at nighttime. Here are three common bat sounds — and what they mean.

It's now well-established that bats can develop a mental picture of their environment using echolocation. But we're still figuring out what that means—how bats take the echoes of their own ...

Bats live in a world of sounds. They use vocalizations both to communicate with their conspecifics and for navigation. For the latter, they emit sounds in the ultrasonic range, which echo and enable ...

Researcher May Dixon discovered that frog-eating bats could recognize ringtones indicating a food reward up to four years later Vanessa Crooks Researchers used speakers to play ringtones to the bats ...

What do bats, dolphins, shrews, and whales have in common? Echolocation! Echolocation is the ability to use sound to navigate. Many animals, and even some humans, are able to use sounds in order to ...

P. kuhlii above a spectrogram of its echolocation sequence. Source: Eran Amichai, used with permission. Many bats navigate using echolocation—emitting high-frequency sound pulses and analyzing the ...

This Tech Note column appeared in the December 2020 issue as "Cut the Clutter." Subscribe to Discover magazine for more stories like this. One rainy night in March 2007, graduate student Ralph Simon ...

There are certain skills that once we acquire them, we rarely have to relearn them, like riding a bike or looking both ways before crossing a street. Most studies on learning and long-term memory in ...