ArticlePLoS biology2022
Bats expand their vocal range by recruiting different laryngeal structures for echolocation and social communication.
Article in PLoS biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- A proposal for epithelial dominance in extremely high fundamental frequency vocalizations.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025Article
- Neuronal activity underlying vocal production in bats.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Bat echolocation signals based on the time-varying autoregressive method.Frontiers in zoology · 2025Article
- Vocal membranes lower the phonation threshold pressure in rhesus macaques (Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Applying nonlinear dynamics to the voice: a historical perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Nonlinear phenomena in animal vocalizations: do they reflect alternative functional modes of voice control, 'leaked' cues to quality or condition, or both?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Vocal registers expand signal diversity in vertebrate vocal communication.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Twin vocal folds as a novel evolutionary adaptation for vocal communications in lemurs.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Musculoskeletal morphogenesis supports the convergent evolution of bat laryngeal echolocation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Bats possess the anatomical substrate for a laryngeal motor cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Spectrally non-overlapping background noise disturbs echolocation via acoustic masking in the CF-FM bat,Conservation physiology · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Echolocating bats produce very diverse vocal signals for echolocation and social communication that span an impressive frequency range of 1 to 120 kHz or 7 octaves. This tremendous vocal range is unparalleled in mammalian sound production and thought to be produced by specialized laryngeal vocal membranes on top of vocal folds. However, their function in vocal production remains untested. By filming vocal membranes in excised bat larynges (Myotis daubentonii) in vitro with ultra-high-speed video (up to 250,000 fps) and using deep learning networks to extract their motion, we provide the first direct observations that vocal membranes exhibit flow-induced self-sustained vibrations to produce 10 to 95 kHz echolocation and social communication calls in bats. The vocal membranes achieve the highest fundamental frequencies (fo's) of any mammal, but their vocal range is with 3 to 4 octaves comparable to most mammals. We evaluate the currently outstanding hypotheses for vocal membrane function and propose that most laryngeal adaptations in echolocating bats result from selection for producing high-frequency, rapid echolocation calls to catch fast-moving prey. Furthermore, we show that bats extend their lower vocal range by recruiting their ventricular folds-as in death metal growls-that vibrate at distinctly lower frequencies of 1 to 5 kHz for producing agonistic social calls. The different selection pressures for echolocation and social communication facilitated the evolution of separate laryngeal structures that together vastly expanded the vocal range in bats.
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