Bats’ brains are built for navigation
More than a thousand species use echolocation, but after billions of years of evolution, bats’ brains are especially well optimized for navigation.
A new paper released today in Science suggests that as bats fly, special neurons known as place cells—located in their hippocampus, a part of the brain that controls memory—helps them process key navigational information about their position not only in the moment but in the past and future as well.
“The finding is kind of intuitive, because we, at least as humans—we have the capability of thinking about where we're going to be or where we've been,” says Nicholas Dotson, a project scientist at the Salk Institute and the lead author of the study.
Using a combination of wireless neural data loggers and a motion-tracking system made of 16 cameras, Dotson and his coauthor Michael Yartsev, a professor of neurobiology and engineering at UC Berkeley, observed six Egyptian fruit bats in two experiments meant to record bursts of neural activity.
While some of the bats randomly explored a room covered in black foam to minimize acoustic reverberations, others were given a foraging task that involved indoor feeders, and one lucky critter was even tested in both environments.
