The researchers studied 22 Egyptian fruit bats to know more about what information they share with each other.
Bats are intelligent animals although many people still argue about this. These animals have a special way of communicating with each other. You may be wondering what they are communicating with one another. Well, some of the topics are mating, fighting, eating, and sleeping.
These nocturnal Egyptian fruit bats have invented a “language” of their own. Many specialists believe that this “language” can help human communication too. In order to find out more about the communication between these nocturnal creatures, researchers made an analysis.
They found out that these animals have more than 15,000 sounds. The researchers studied 22 Egyptian fruit bats to know more about what information they share with each other. They mentioned that these animals share a lot of information and they found that the identity of the listener and the talker are known.
“We now know that the cacophony we hear when entering a bat cave is far from just noise,” said study lead author Yossi Yovel, a Tel Aviv University neurobiologist. “We have found that bats fight over sleeping positions, over mating, over food or just for the sake of fighting.”
The researchers observed that these animals make different sounds when they are greeting a foe or a friend. The researchers identified the differences very quickly.
Bats are considered to be social animals just like humans. These animals can live up to 30 years which is a lot for a small animal considering that dogs and cats live less than 20 years usually. These nocturnal animals are believed to have a special language just like other intelligent animals such as monkeys and dolphins.
In order to find out more about the way, they communicate the researchers kept the bats in an improvised bat cave where these nocturnal animals were monitored with microphones and video cameras for more than 70 days.
This is not the first study on this topic but it is for sure on of the biggest and most documented one. Let’s hope that the findings will show more about their language and that humans can use this type of language too.
What is your opinion about these Egyptian fruit bats? Did you know that they have a special language?
Image source: Wikipedia
