Climate change makes some insect-eating bats change their calls

Climate change makes some insect-eating bats change their callsBats have come up with some creative solutions to spending life on the wing in the pitch black.Perhaps their most famous solution is using their voice and the returning echoes to navigate through the darkness and to home in on the insects they feast ona process called echolocation.However, as climate change causes the world around them to warm, it might also be changing their calls.'Temperature and relative humidity affect how high-pitched calls travel through the air.This could change how far echolocation calls travel and how well bats detect prey', explains Paula Iturralde-Plit of the Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica.This knowledge led her to team up with Marcelo Araya-Salas and Gloriana Chaverri, also of the Universidad de Costa Rica, and Holger Goerlitz of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, Germany, to see whether warmer temperatures might change certain aspects of the bat's calls.