Love Songs Certain to Drive the Ladies Batty

It may not pack the same emotional punch as a good hair metal, three chord, power ballad, but it turns out that there's a species of bat of which the males court the ladies with the help of a love song.

A collaborative effort among biologists from Texas A&M and the University of Texas spanned a period of three years of collecting and analyzing recordings of courtship behaviors. The team found that the Brazilian free-tailed bat (also known as a Mexican free-tailed bat) displays sonic courtship behaviors that are decidedly rare among mammals.

Kirsten Bohn of the University of Texas provides the background to the bat sounds:

"The sounds they make are very difficult for the human ear to pick up. They are at a very high frequency range, but our recording equipment could track them very well. The sounds are made in a specific, arranged pattern to form a song, and there are actually organized sequences within each phrase. They are made to attract and lure nearby females."

Their study, made possible through National Institutes of Health support and currently published in the online journal PLoS ONE, found that the same species demonstrated a variety of song stylings across neighboring territories, but that males in all locations constructed their songs from the same vocabulary of what the researchers refer to as syllables and phrases.

Photo courtesy of Ron Groves, U.S. DOT, via Wikimedia Commons