I was just thinking about the inherent bias in this, correlating activity/behavior to temporal locality of call. That said, they used 24-hr audio/video surveillance of fruit bats spanning months, which is… fairly comprehensive.
We found that bat vocalizations carry ample information about the identity of the emitter, the context of the call, the behavioral response to the call, and even the call’s addressee. Our results underline the importance of studying the mundane, pairwise, directed, vocal interactions of animals.
That’s actually pretty neat. Still don’t understand why someone would think they were just random sounds. Somewhat similar to the comic someone linked above… I wonder if we were to do the same analysis of all frequencies of a dog’s communication, might we discover the true BarkNet?
