Max Planck Institut for Ornithology | Research | Max Planck Research Group Siemers | Projects

Daniela Schmieder

PhD student

Phone: +49 8157 932-359
Fax: +49 8157 932-344

E-mail: dschmieder@orn.mpg.de

Sara Troxell

student

Phone: +49 8157 932-419
Fax: +49 8157 932-344

E-mail: stroxell@orn.mpg.de

Adriana Dorado Correa

student

Phone: +49 8157 932-420
Fax: +49 8157 932-344

E-mail: adorado@orn.mpg.de

Dr. Klemen Koselj

Post Doc

Phone: +49 8157 932-399
Fax: +49 8157 932-344

E-mail: koselj@orn.mpg.de

Dr. Andrea Schaub

former Post Doc at Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen

E-mail: andrea.schaub@uni-tuebingen.de

Videos

<p>Mealworm to go</p>

Highspeed video of a foraging event by the Natterer's bat (Myotis nattereri). The mealworm had been lowered on a nylon string from the remote-controlled feeder, the passing bat has localized it and now turns to catch it in its tail membrane.

Publications

Björn M. Siemers, Andrea Schaub

Hunting at the highway: traffic noise reduces foraging efficiency in acoustic predators

Proceedings of the Royal Society B, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2262, in press (2011)

Björn M. Siemers, Hans-Ulrich Schnitzler

Natterer’s bat (Myotis nattereri Kuhl, 1818) hawks for prey close to vegetation using echolocation signals of very broad bandwidth

Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 47: 400-412 (2000)

Daniela Schmieder, Tigga Kingston, Rosli Hashim, Björn M. Siemers

Breaking the trade-off: rainforest bats maximise bandwidth and repetition rate of echolocation calls as they approach prey

Biology Letters, 6: 604-609 (2010)

Prey detection and Foraging

For foraging, bats rely almost exclusively on their acoustic sense. Passive-acoustic bats like the greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) listen to rustling noises generated by their prey. Active-acoustic species find their prey by the echoes of their own ultrasonic calls. Examples of this second group are the natterer's bats (Myotis nattereri) and the greater horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus ferrumquinum).

Both groups face a similar problem: the acoustic masking of their prey by either noise of natural or artificial sources (water rustling, traffic noise) or by unwanted echoes of the background vegetation.

Zoom Image

Cowsheds are most suitable hunting grounds for natterer's bats. In this experiment, an array of loudspeakers (red) simulates buzzing flies.

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MPIO/Kriner

We studied the effects of traffic noise on foraging behaviour of the greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) in a lab experiment. The animals were trained to find a food reward in that one out of 64 platforms that broadcast an insect rustling on leaf clutter. During testing, traffic noise playbacks were run at varying sound levels.The louder the noise, the more the foraging efficiency of the bats decreased (Siemers & Schaub 2011).

Natterer's bats (Myotis nattereri) are real echolocation specialists thanks to their broadbanded calls. They are able to detect and catch prey within a distance of only centimetres to the background clutter (Siemers & Schnitzler 2000). Bats of the non-European families Kerivoulinae and Murininae showed similar abilities in experiments (Schmieder et al. 2010).

Rhinolophid bats have developed yet another strategy to find prey close to vegetation. They use CF (constant frequency) echolocation calls, which get modulated as soon as they meet an insect's fluttering wings. The resulting glints in the echo can be perceived by the bats.

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