Foraging Flexibility in the Frog-Eating Bat, Trachops cirrhosus

نویسندگان

  • Michael J. Ryan
  • Creagh Breuner
  • Frank Bronson
  • Michael Domjan
  • George Pollak
  • Merlin Tuttle
  • Rachel Ann Page
  • Elisabeth Kalko
  • Karin Akre
چکیده

The fringe-lipped bat, Trachops cirrhosus, uses frog mating calls to detect and locate its prey. The túngara frog, Physalaemus pustulosus, a preferred prey species of this bat, produces two types of sexual advertisement calls, simple and complex, and both female frogs and predatory bats prefer complex calls to simple ones. Complex calls differ from simple ones in that they contain chucks: short, broadband suffixes with distinct onsets and offsets, acoustic properties that should maximize binaural comparisons and facilitate localization. We investigated the hypothesis that frog-eating bats prefer complex túngara frog calls to simple ones because they find complex calls easier to localize. We tested bats in experimental conditions that mirror the conditions they encounter in nature: we broadcast túngara frog calls with and without background noise, and with and without intervening obstacles. We broadcast calls either continually during the hunting approach or only prior to the bat’s flight to mimic the condition in which frogs have detected an approaching bat and ceased calling. Bats showed a trend for better localization performance of complex calls than simple ones in all treatment conditions. Significant differences in localization performance were found in some but not all levels of localization task complexity. This study is the first to offer evidence that an eavesdropping predator shows better localization performance for a preferred signal variant of its prey.

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تاریخ انتشار 2008