2019 Volume 36 Issue 2 Pages 91-99
Echolocating bats produce ultrasonic vocalizations in the air and listen to the echoes returning from objects to obtain information about their surroundings. They have been extensively experimented in artificial environments as model animals to investigate the auditory mechanism that achieves highly-sophisticated echolocation. On the other hand, the use of ultrasound by bats in natural environments has not been well-studied due to its high measurement difficulty, although the bats have shown high sonar performance of feeding small flying insects one after another in the field. In this century, with the improvement of measurement technology, many observations on bio-sonar operations by bats such as directional control for prey search and localization have been reported. Furthermore, the rational strategy of echolocating bats to catch multiple prey effectively one after another in a row has become clear in recent years. In this paper, we review the bat echolocation during foraging flight, focusing particularly on field studies. We first overview the fundamental characteristics of bat echolocation, and then divide the foraging flight into following three situations; (1) prey search, (2) prey-capture flight and (3) multi-target capture flight, in order to discuss their echolocation strategy for foraging.
