Bats Hunting

Good example of the potential use of biomimicry

 Tiny Computers Reveal How Wild Bats Hunt So Efficiently

Aarhus University (Denmark), Peter F. Gammelby; Laura Stidsholt March 3, 2021

Researchers at Denmark's Aarhus University and Germany's Max Planck Institute of Ornithology used 3-gram computers attached to wild greater mouse-eared bats in Bulgaria to study how they hunt. The miniature tags record each bat's echolocation calls and movement in three dimensions. The institute's Holger Goerlitz said, "We found that hunting bats narrow their sensory volumes by more than a thousand times to only focus on the prey, and thereby reduce the clutter from other echoes. It's like an acoustic version of a tunnel vision that briefly makes their world much simpler." Said Aarhus University's Mark Johnson, who developed the tags, "It was a real challenge to make a computer so small that it could work on a flying bat and still be sensitive enough to pick up these weak sounds."