EAPSI: How Moving Ears and Nose Helps Bats Understand Sound

Sutlive Joseph V, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

Bats use echolocation to navigate without the aid of sight, using their nostrils and ears as a sonar system to fly and hunt in a cluttered environment. No current human-made sonar can reproduce this. Many bat species have been observed to move their ears and noseleaf (a structure which sits atop the nostrils) as they echolocate. This research will investigate how this motion effects how bats interpret echo signals in the brain. The species to be studied, the greater horseshoe bat, is native to China and has been shown to have a particularly efficient "bio-sonar." This research will be conducted in collaboration with Professor Hiroshi Riquimaroux at Shandong University in Jinan, China, who has expertise in the study of physiology of hearing, particularly in bats. The study will observe how motion in the pinna and noseleaf structures during echolocation influences how the brain encodes auditory signals. A population of Rhinolophus and Hipposiderus bats, two species native to China, will be tethered while performing various sensing tasks. The local field potential responses will be recorded to determine the overall effects of dynamics of anatomical structures. The responses after a sensing task will be recorded to observe how motion specifically effects signaling in the superior and inferior colliculi. The study will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Hiroshi Riquimaroux at Shandong University in Jinan, China. He is a neuroscientist with expertise in the field of acoustics and the auditory system. This award, under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Program, supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by the NSF and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.