Author: Yao-Hua Law / Source: Science News
When it comes to migration science, birds rule. Although many mammals — antelopes, whales, bats — migrate, too, scientists know far less about how those animals do it.
But a new device, invented by animal navigation researcher Oliver Lindecke, could open a new way to test how far-ranging bats find their way.Lindecke, of Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany, has been studying bat migration since 2011. He started with analyzing different forms of hydrogen atoms in wild bats to infer where they had flown from. But figuring out how the bats knew where to go was trickier.
Lindecke needed a field setup that let him test what possible cues from nature helped bats navigate across vast distances. The first step was studying in which direction the bats first take flight. Such experiments on birds typically involve confining the animals in small, enclosed spaces. But that doesn’t work for bats, which tend to fall asleep in such spaces.
“My challenge was to build a box that bats won’t sleep in, but will show me how they take off,” Lindecke says.
So he invented what he calls…
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