When entrances to caves and mines — essential roosting places for bats — are blocked to prevent people from going inside, the gates often include a pipe to allow bats to access their roosts.
When entrances to caves and mines — essential roosting places for bats — are blocked to prevent people from going inside, the gates often include a pipe to allow bats to access their roosts. However, many of the pipes have been constructed with corrugated rings for added strength.
Through field observations, biologist Patricia E. Brown discovered that some bat species will abandon roosts with entrances constructed with these corrugated rings. Now, new research helps to explain why — the corrugations create unusual acoustic effects that interfere with bats’ echolocation and prevent them from navigating properly.
“From a conservation point of view, anything that interferes with the use of individual roosts by bats, particularly species whose populations are threatened, deserves attention to see if it might be mitigated,” said James Simmons, a Brown University professor of biology and lead author of the new study published in Scientific Reports this month.
In the study, bats attempted to navigate through two different scenarios in a custom-built flight room: a narrow corridor surrounded by vertically hanging plastic chains to model vegetation, and a tunnel of round plastic hula hoops to model the pattern of raised rings along a corrugated pipe.
Read more at Brown University
Image: In the study, bats attempted to navigate through two different scenarios in a custom-built flight room, including this tunnel of round plastic hula hoops to model the pattern of raised rings along a corrugated pipe. CREDIT: Brown University
