Bats: Their Memory Abilities

[Lanark_And_Rima]

I was reading Peter Ackroyd's fantastic psychogeographic ghost story The House of Doctor Dee the other day, and came upon this little gem from the good doctor:

"Into what blind and grasping errors in old time we were led, thinking every merry word a very witchcraft and every old wife's tale a truth, viz. that the touch of an ashen bough causes giddiness in a vipers head, and that a bat lightly struck with the leaf of an elm tree loses his remembrance.'

Has anyone out there heard the old wives' tale about the bat, or was it an original Ackroyd invention. The questions it raises - why would an elm leaf do this, why would you want to do it and how on earth could you tell it worked? - suggest some odd things about the mental processes of pre-Elizabethan old wives if it was current...

 

[EnolaGaia]

The isolated and unanswered post above makes a good intro to this new science story from Smithsonian Magazine. It would seem bats have substantial long-term memory capabilities.

Wild Bats Can Recognize a Phone’s Ringtone Four Years Later

Wild bats trained to link a specific phone ringtone with a food reward can remember the sound for more than four years, new research suggests. This would put their long-term memory skills on par with other wildlife memory masters like monkeys and crows.

The findings, published last week in the journal Current Biology, may offer new insights into the cognitive abilities of bats, as well as how animals use their long-term memory in their daily lives.

Researchers caught 49 predatory fringe-lipped bats— Trachops cirrhosis, a medium-sized bat common in Central and South America—in the wild and trained them to fly toward a specific ringtone by rewarding them with food. These bats hunt by listening for the mating calls of several frog and katydid species. Cleverly, the bats can tell the difference between poisonous species and non-poisonous species just by their different sounds.

To train the bats, the scientists placed a baitfish snack above a speaker, then played the mating call of the male túngara frog, one of the bats’ favorite foods. As the study continued, the researchers gradually mixed in the sound of a ringtone ... with the frog call; eventually, the ringtone replaced the frog call entirely. In videos published in the paper, the bats can be seen visibly reacting, twitching and turning their ears, towards the repeated sound of the ringtone. The researchers also introduced three other ringtones that were not associated with a food reward, thus training the bats to recognize one specific ringtone. ...

For 11 to 27 days, the bats munched on at least 40 snacks each by flying to the speaker that played the ringtone. Researchers then microchipped and released the bats into the wild.

Over the next four years, the scientists recaptured eight of the wild bats from the initial study and put their memories to the test. The bats appeared to have retained most of their training and flew quickly toward the speaker playing the food-related ringtone; they were also able to discern between the ringtone and a new sound. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...a-phones-ringtone-four-years-later-180980314/