Greif Stefan, Siemers Björn M
Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Sensory Ecology Group, Eberhard-Gwinner-Straße, Seewiesen 82319, Germany.
Nat Commun. 2010 Nov 2;1:107. doi: 10.1038/ncomms1110.
In the course of their lives, most animals must find different specific habitat and microhabitat types for survival and reproduction. Yet, in vertebrates, little is known about the sensory cues that mediate habitat recognition. In free flying bats the echolocation of insect-sized point targets is well understood, whereas how they recognize and classify spatially extended echo targets is currently unknown. In this study, we show how echolocating bats recognize ponds or other water bodies that are crucial for foraging, drinking and orientation. With wild bats of 15 different species (seven genera from three phylogenetically distant, large bat families), we found that bats perceived any extended, echo-acoustically smooth surface to be water, even in the presence of conflicting information from other sensory modalities. In addition, naive juvenile bats that had never before encountered a water body showed spontaneous drinking responses from smooth plates. This provides the first evidence for innate recognition of a habitat cue in a mammal.
在其生命过程中，大多数动物必须找到不同的特定栖息地和微栖息地类型以生存和繁殖。然而，对于脊椎动物，介导栖息地识别的感官线索却知之甚少。在自由飞行的蝙蝠中，对昆虫大小的点状目标的回声定位已得到充分了解，而它们如何识别和分类空间扩展的回声目标目前尚不清楚。在这项研究中，我们展示了回声定位的蝙蝠如何识别对觅食、饮水和定向至关重要的池塘或其他水体。通过对15种不同物种（来自三个系统发育距离较远的大型蝙蝠科的七个属）的野生蝙蝠进行研究，我们发现蝙蝠会将任何扩展的、回声声学上平滑的表面视为水，即使存在来自其他感官模式的冲突信息。此外，从未接触过水体的天真幼蝠对平滑平板会表现出自发的饮水反应。这为哺乳动物对栖息地线索的先天识别提供了首个证据。
