Spatio-temporal dynamics of an acoustic communication network: how echolocating bats communicate and orient in free-flying groups

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Communication and movement are crucial behaviours that enable social interactions between animals. In echolocating bats, communication and movement are naturally coupled: during flight, bats ‘communicate with themselves’ by listening for echoes of their own powerful calls. This constant stream of calls is also audible to other bats and informs them about the sender`s position and behaviour. Besides echolocation calls, bats also emit a variety of social calls during flight for interindividual communication. These two acoustic behaviours render bats the most vocal of mammals; their acoustic communication networks during flight are dense, spatio-temporally dynamic and involve diverse acoustic stimuli, often from different species. Echolocating bats are thus ideal to reveal evolution-tested communication and navigation strategies, which will advance our insight into behavioural principles and stimulate bio-inspired engineering and robotics.Combining three-dimensional flight path tracking, call analysis, playback experiments and spatial modelling, I will study how bats follow, evade and communicate with each other (‘air traffic control’) and how this affects the emergent spatial patterns of bat groups. I will quantify flight trajectories and inter-individual reactions of multiple free-ranging bats in different flight situations and relate their flight behaviour to emitted calls. Playbacks of echolocation and social calls of different species and from different distances will test for interspecific and distance-dependent effects on flight direction, trajectory measures and overall space use of multiple individuals. In a framework of movement ecology, I will use the obtained data to develop stochastic state-space models and to test behavioural rules for following and evasion flight. I thus aim to achieve a mechanism-based understanding of how individual vocal and flight behaviour affects the flight of other individuals and the emergent patterns of whole groups.