Bats have a longer memory than some think. The fringe lip bat (trachops cirrhosus) feeds on insects and frogs that it finds by following their mating calls. The animals have learned to distinguish between the calls of different types of frogs in order not to eat poisonous prey. Now there is indications of how long the bat brain stores this information, as a team in the magazine »Current Biology« reports.
In order to test memory, May Dixon from the University of Texas in Austin and her colleagues trained wildly caught bats to react to a specific ringtone. To do this, they had the animals attack small fish that were placed on a loudspeaker. The team then put the bats into the wilderness and caught eight of them again between one and four years later.
To test whether they would remember their training, the eight bats heard the ringtone again. Almost all previously captured animals then pounced on their prey, while wild-caught, untrained bats usually just twitched their ears.
The researchers say that reminding of noises could help the bats even after years of hunting rare prey or finding frogs that mate.
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