100 YEARS OLD AND STILL TOTALLY BATS ABOUT BATS...
ARE there, I wonder, any bat colonies living in the Palace of Westminster? If so, it could explain a great deal, though whether the bats are picking up ideas from our politicians or the politicians are taking their cue from the bats is an open question.
The reason I ask is that I have been reading a paper published at the end of 2016 in the journal Scientific Reports entitled “Everyday bat vocalisations contain information about emitter, addressee, context, and behaviour”, which has some surprising revelations on the things bats say to one another.
The authors of the paper, Yosef Prat, Mor Taub and Yossi Yovel from Tel Aviv University, begin by making the point that most animal chit-chat seems to be about food, or danger, or similar topics addressed to the group at large. Dolphins, monkeys and humans often direct their utterances to particular individuals but most creatures just shout their comments to any members of their species who can hear.
However by monitoring 162,376 vocalisations of 22 captive bats over a period of 75 days, the researchers were able to identify a large number of bat squawks that were clearly addressed from one particular bat to another. In particular, they analysed 14,863 vocalisations made by seven adult females which they were able to place into clear categories.
Some of these were the usual alarm or food-related calls, but others were categorized as “Mating aggression – produced by females in protest to males’ mating attempts”. They say that “these vocalisations were exclusively directed towards the male” and no doubt often made it perfectly clear to him that his attentions were neither desired nor appreciated.
Armed with these research findings and the new dictionary of bat-speak, I naturally sought out confirmation from a lady bat who was flying past. “I’ve read that paper,” she said, “and I’m deeply shocked. I never realised there was so much of that sort of thing going on. It happened to me a few years ago, you know. I was hanging upside down minding my own business in a crowded cave, when a male came up to me and started fondling my dactylopatagium with his basal metacarpal.
“I was deeply shocked, I can tell you. I mean, we hadn’t even been introduced, though I think he’d echolocated me as soon as I came into the cave. Anyway, I made it perfectly clear to him that his attentions were not wanted and I said so in a firm but quiet tone that was clearly directed at him and him alone. It served its purpose and he went away.
“Ever since I read the paper you mention, though, I’ve wondered whether he went off to pester some other poor female bat and whether I ought to have spoken out about it to all and sundry at the time. Such behaviour is not acceptable now and was not at the time. These batmen going around as though they are above the law is a disgrace to all chiroptera.”
I tried asking all the male bats in the vicinity whether they had molested the female I was speaking to but they all denied all knowledge of the incident.