

To scream or to listen? Prey detection and discrimination in animal-eating bats. Bats perceptually weight prey cues across sensory systems when hunting in noise. Gomes, DGE, Page, RA, Geipel, I, Taylor, RC, Ryan, MJ, Halfwerk W.
#DIRECTOR AT AUSTIN VOCAL LAB SERIES#
In: Perception and Cognition in Animal Communication (volume editors, MA Bee and CT Miller), in the book series Animal Signals and Communication (series editors: P.K.

Overcoming sensory uncertainty: factors affecting foraging decisions in frog-eating bats. This trimodal communication system (acoustic, visual/echolocation, seismic), exploited by both intended and unintended receivers, provides fertile ground for experiments investigating the costs and benefits of multimodal courtship display. Vocal sac inflation, in turn, generates ripples on the water surface that influences calling in nearby males, and increases attractiveness to predatory bats. Both female frogs and eavesdropping bats attend to the sound of the mating call as well as to the movement of the dynamically inflating and deflating vocal sac, female frogs using vision, bats using echolocation. To produce their calls, males shuttle air back and forth across their vocal folds, between the body cavity and a large, visually conspicuous vocal sac.

Males gather in shallow bodies of water in the forest at night, producing loud mating calls which increase in complexity when acoustically competing with other males. The male túngara frog competes for mates using multimodal advertisement signals.
