This is scientific American's 60 second science.

I'm Christopher in Taliata.

When we humans talk to other humans, the sounds we make all have very specific meanings.

When I say apple, you immediately imagine something that has the characteristics of an apple.

Yossi Yovel, a neuroecologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

And the question is, do animals also have something like that?

Jovil and his team chose to listen in on bats, which do a lot of vocalizing.

In fact, in caves with vast numbers of bats bats it's total cacophony.

It sounds like a crowd in a football stadium before the match has begun or something like that.

To simplify the problem, the researchers eavesdropped on a much smaller colony, just 22 Egyptian

fruit bats.

Over several months, they recorded tens of thousands of calls along

with synced up video which allowed him to decipher the speaker, the

intended recipient, the situation, and the behavior resulting from each call.

They then fed their huge database of calls to computers

to test whether machine learning could help make sense of them

using algorithms like the ones used for human speech recognition.

Turns out the algorithms could correctly identify which bat made each call.

More often than chance would predict.

And I can say to some extent who is this bat shouting at.

So who is the ad receipt of this vocalization?

They could even figure out what a bat might be angry about.

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