ArticleScientific reports2017
Bat songs as acoustic beacons - male territorial songs attract dispersing females.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Cryptic Vocal Communication in the Proboscis Bat (Rhynchonycteris naso).Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Song flight and 3D thermal detection provide evidence for bat attraction to wind turbines in Central Europe.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Dialect Formation in Ghost Bats: Genetic, Geographic and Morphological Drivers of Social and Echolocation Call Divergence.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Computational Urban Ecology of New York City Rats.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Mating system and copulatory behavior of the greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis).Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Maternal behavior influences vocal practice and learning processes in the greater sac-winged bat.eLife · 2025Article
- The soundscape of swarming: Proof of concept for a noninvasive acoustic species identification of swarmingEcology and evolution · 2022Article
- A researcher's guide to the comparative assessment of vocal production learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Great Himalayan Leaf-Nosed Bats Produce Different Territorial Calls to Respond to Sympatric Species and Non-Living Objects.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Article
- Comparison of methods for rhythm analysis of complex animals' acoustic signals.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Behaviour, biology and evolution of vocal learning in bats.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- The masked seducers: Lek courtship behavior in the wrinkle-faced bat Centurio senex (Phyllostomidae).PloS one · 2020Article
- Social calls of Myotis nattereri during swarming: Call structure mirrors the different behavioral context.PloS one · 2019Article
- General isochronous rhythm in echolocation calls and social vocalizations of the batRoyal Society open science · 2019Article
- Non-breeding European robins adjust their song in noisy environments.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Male song in birds and mammals is important for repelling rivals, stimulating mates or attracting them to a specific location. Nevertheless, direct experimental evidence for the mate attraction function of male song is limited to a few studies. Here, we provide strong experimental evidence that male songs attract wild female bats (Saccopteryx bilineata). Playbacks of territorial songs reliably elicited phonotaxis in females but not males. Most females captured during playbacks were subadults searching for new colonies to settle in. In S. bilineata, multiple males sing simultaneously at dawn and dusk, thereby creating a conspicuous chorus which encodes information on colony identity and size. Since territorial songs have a large signalling range, male songs constitute acoustic beacons which enable females to localize new colonies. In our playbacks, females strongly preferred local territorial songs over foreign territorial songs from two different locations, indicating that song familiarity influences phonotaxis. Our study provides the first clear experimental evidence that male song elicits female phonotaxis in a non-human mammal. Bats are an especially promising taxon for studying mammalian song since male song has been described in different species with diverse social organisations and natural histories, thus providing exciting opportunities for phylogenetically controlled comparative studies.
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