Welcome to the Bat Lab at Johns Hopkins University!

Welcome to a virtual tour of the JHU BatLab! Meet the animals at the heart of our research, echolocating bats, and get an inside look into our research on auditory perception, attention, memory, and the processes enabling social interactions, target tracking, and navigation in complex 3D environments. Echolocating bats coordinate sonar signal production with flight maneuvers in response to dynamic echo information and exhibit a rich array of natural sensory-guided behaviors. In this tour, we demonstrate the use of equipment, such as microphone arrays and high-speed video cameras, to quantify and analyze adaptive echolocation behaviors and 3D flight kinematics in two bat species, the insectivorous big brown bat and the Egyptian fruit bat. These species differ in their natural behaviors and modes of echolocation. Egyptian fruit bats navigate long distances to their foraging sites and use tongue-click echolocation, along with vision, to find food and travel to roosts. Big brown bats typically forage close to their roosting sites and use echoes from sonar vocalizations to find small insect prey in the dark. Join us to explore bat’s use of echolocation and gain a deeper appreciation for the research that unlocks the secrets of these remarkable creatures and their sensory-guided behaviors.