The bat that walked backward developed a unique navigation technique

Orienting yourself in the darkness of a cave seems like a difficult task. However, some bats may have an ingenious solution: use tails.

Larger mouse tail bat (Rhinopoma Microphyllum) Live in groups within small caves that are difficult to fly, so they move deeper by hanging from the cave walls and raw to the rear. They manipulate this way in many situations, depending on the appearance of the predator, or when they want to find a better location in the cave.

Biologists have wondered whether these bats might use their unusually long tails as “sensors” to navigate through the cave. Yossi Yovel Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues designed two experiments to test bat tails.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7ku1o9zajk

In the first experiment, researchers recreated a setup that mimics the interior of a cave, creating a maze with obstacles that resemble the uneven, rocky terrain where bats encounter nature. The team measured how long it took the bat to climb the wall, then raw backwards, first naturally and then anaesthetized the tail to measure how smooth it was.

The bat moved its tail back and forth, feeling the obstacles and went through the maze. However, when researchers anesthetized the bat’s tail, the flying mammals navigated the maze without making it smoother and sailed about 10% slower. But they still do that and suggest that they use other body parts to feel the disorder. “When you walk back you can still feel it in your body and feet,” Jubel says. “It’s clear they can do that, but they’ve reduced performance significantly.”

In the second experiment, the researchers designed a Y-shaped maze that presents two corridors with different raised textures that bats can feel. They used the difference in textures of the two corridors to teach bats that one corridor brought rewards, while the other was not. The texture difference was subtle, but one corridor had lattices every 1.5 centimeters and every 1 cm, but the animals were able to distinguish them.

Other bat species have long tails, but researchers say this is the only known thing to use this unique strategy to find its way in the dark. “I don’t think this is common for long-tailed bats,” Jubel says. But “we really don’t know until we test other bats.”