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This is a scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Jason Goldman.

Each night small groups of a species called velvety free-tail bats emerge from their roosts in the

Panamanian rainforests to hunt for their insect prey using echolocation.

When bats are hunting, especially when they're in open areas,

they produce two really distinct call types.

So they have their search phase calls when they're just scanning the environment.

And then they have feeding buzzes when they actually detect prey like an

insect swarm.

Jenna Kohl's a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany.

Both types of calls are typically too high-pitched for us to hear, but other bats can eavesdrop

on those feeding buzzes and use them as a cue for finding food.

And it's always been assumed that the other calls, search phase calls, don't include that kind of social information.

But Kohl's on her team wondered if search... to include that kind of social information.

But Kohl's on her team wondered if search phase calls

might also be social and help bats stick together in the dark.

This is why we then tested first whether these echolocation calls that they produce when their skin in the environment kind of contain information about a bats identity like in the form of an individual signature and then more more importantly, we wanted to test

whether bats can actually use this information

to discriminate between different individuals

just using these search phase echolocation calls.

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