Pallas long-tongued bats have the fastest metabolism of any mammal, hovering just outside flowers like hummingbirds to feed on nectar. Now, using a high-speed infrared camera, researchers at Dartmouth College have discovered that these bat whiskers help them expertly extract nectar from flowers. The discovery not only reveals important information about bats, but also how plants and animals can evolve together.
Pallas long-tongued bats live in Central and South America. They eat flowers by shooting them with their very long tongues to collect nectar. To aid in this task, the animal also has very long whiskers arranged in a specific pattern on its snout. This differs from the short, randomly grown whiskers of other species of bats that do not eat nectar.
“The whiskers of nectar-eating bats are important sensory organs that provide high-quality input that the brain functions to optimize hovering,” said lead author of the study, who studied echolocation in bats. said Elan Amicha, a postdoctoral researcher in biological sciences at Dartmouth College. .
“This is a cool junction between sensory biology and biomechanics, between form and function.”
To learn more about the animal, its whiskers, and how it performs its impressive aerial feeding routine, Dartmouth researchers installed a series of hand-blown glass “flowers” filled with nectar. Then, they released the bats and used a high-speed infrared camera to collect video and still images of the creatures feeding. The researchers then clipped off the whiskers of some bats and found that their feeding abilities were much less agile. “Shaving off the whiskers doesn’t make the bats less feeding, it just makes them less graceful,” he said. “If it was gymnastics, they would get 8.5 instead of 9.8.”
Once the experiment was complete, the researchers held the bats long enough for their whiskers to grow back before releasing them back into the wild.
We concluded that bat whiskers are an important factor in their ability to feed efficiently. In this study, most feedings occurred within 1 second of him. The researchers say the find also helped them understand how bats and flowers in the region co-evolved. They say that the longer whiskers, along with the bat’s facial shape and powerful tongue, evolved to allow bats to eat their preferred deep-throated flowers. Creatures like algae had to get deep enough inside the flower to pick up the pollen and disperse it elsewhere in the forest.
By revealing the function of the unusually long whiskers of Pallas’ long-tongued bats, Amicha said, along with a better understanding of how non-humans navigate their environment, they have gained insights that could aid conservation efforts. Unraveling the locomotion patterns of bats could also stimulate the development of new technologies, as seen in shape-shifting drones and potentially improved avionics.
Amichai said, “When you think about it in terms of going back and forth between completely different ways of perceiving the world and seamlessly integrating those inputs, it turns out to be an amazing concept.
“We are peculiar animals. To perceive the world we rely solely on our sight, and to a lesser extent our hearing. We interpret behavior in similar terms, which often completely misinterprets us as to what they are doing and why. It helps us see the world through” and better understand their behaviors, needs and challenges.
The team plans to do more research in the future to see how bats handle moving flowers, predators and other situations.
Pallas’ long-tongued bats can be seen feeding in the following ultra-slow motion video provided by the researchers.
Bat flight and feeding
A study was published in a journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences.
Source: Dartmouth College via EurekAlert
