title: Echo-acoustic flow affects flight in bats.
abstract: Flying animals need to react fast to rapid changes in their environment. Visually guided animals use optic flow, generated by their movement through structured environments. Nocturnal bats cannot make use of optic flow, but rely mostly on echolocation. Here, we show that bats exploit echo-acoustic flow to negotiate flight through narrow passages. Specifically, bats' flight between lateral structures is significantly affected by the echo-acoustic salience of those structures, independent of their physical distance. This is true even though echolocation, unlike vision, provides explicit distance cues. Moreover, the bats reduced the echolocation sound levels in stronger flow, probably to compensate for the increased summary target strength of the lateral reflectors. However, bats did not reduce flight velocity under stronger echo-acoustic flow. Our results demonstrate that sensory flow is a ubiquitous principle for flight guidance, independent of the fundamentally different peripheral representation of flow across the senses of vision and echolocation.
authors.affiliation: Division of Neurobiology, Department Biology II, LMU Munich, Großhaderner Str. 2, 82152 Planegg-Martinsried, Germany.
authors.forename: Kathrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kugler
authors.affiliation: Lehrstuhl für Zoologie, Technische Universität München, Liesel-Beckmann-Str. 4, 85354 Freising, Germany.
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Greiter
authors.affiliation: Lehrstuhl für Zoologie, Technische Universität München, Liesel-Beckmann-Str. 4, 85354 Freising, Germany.
authors.forename: Harald
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Luksch
authors.affiliation: Lehrstuhl für Zoologie, Technische Universität München, Liesel-Beckmann-Str. 4, 85354 Freising, Germany.
authors.forename: Uwe
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Firzlaff
authors.affiliation: Division of Neurobiology, Department Biology II, LMU Munich, Großhaderner Str. 2, 82152 Planegg-Martinsried, Germany lutzw@lmu.de.
authors.forename: Lutz
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-9289-6187
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wiegrebe
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D000818:Animals; D002685:Chiroptera / Q000502:physiology*; D004455:Echolocation; D005260:Female; D005426:Flight, Animal; D008297:Male; D011235:Predatory Behavior
keywords: Echolocation; Flight guidance; Flow field; Navigation; Sonar