Communication with self, friends and foes in active-sensing animals

Abstract

Animals that rely on electrolocation and echolocation for navigation and prey detection benefit from sensory systems that can operate in the dark, allowing them to exploit sensory niches with few competitors. Active sensing has been characterized as a highly specialized form of communication, whereby an echolocating or electrolocating animal serves as both the sender and receiver of sensory information. This characterization inspires a framework to explore the functions of sensory channels that communicate information with the self and with others. Overlapping communication functions create challenges for signal privacy and fidelity by leaving active-sensing animals vulnerable to eavesdropping, jamming and masking. Here, we present an overview of active-sensing systems used by weakly electric fish, bats and odontocetes, and consider their susceptibility to heterospecific and conspecific jamming signals and eavesdropping. Susceptibility to interference from signals produced by both conspecifics and prey animals reduces the fidelity of electrolocation and echolocation for prey capture and foraging. Likewise, active-sensing signals may be eavesdropped, increasing the risk of alerting prey to the threat of predation or the risk of predation to the sender, or drawing competition to productive foraging sites. The evolutionary success of electrolocating and echolocating animals suggests that they effectively counter the costs of active sensing through rich and diverse adaptive behaviors that allow them to mitigate the effects of competition for signal space and the exploitation of their signals.

Perceptual hearing sensitivity during vocal production

“…Echolocating bats use self-generated sounds for orientation and foraging, acting as a biological model for active sensing. 7 , 8 Echolocating bats require high hearing sensitivity for analyzing echo returns merely milliseconds after call production. 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 The auditory processing of echo returns in echolocating bats is thus vulnerable to self-generated masking from call production.…”

Mutual mother‐pup acoustic identification in Asian particolored bats

“…Most insectivorous bats live in highly clustered groups and rely relatively little on vision due to their nocturnal lifestyles (Chaverri et al, 2018). Bats rely on acoustic signals for orientation and communication (Bradbury & Vehrencamp, 1976; Brown, 1976b; Gould, 1971; Jones et al, 2021). Compared to vision, bat acoustic signals are less influenced by obstacles and have no light limitations (Forrest, 1994).…”

“…Bats rely on acoustic signals for orientation and communication (Bradbury & Vehrencamp, 1976;Brown, 1976b;Gould, 1971;Jones et al, 2021). Compared to vision, bat acoustic signals are less influenced by obstacles and have no light limitations (Forrest, 1994).…”

Greater Horseshoe Bats Recognize the Sex and Individual Identity of Conspecifics from Their Echolocation Calls

“…Recently, the results of habituation-dishabituation playback experiments have shown that Rhinolophus clivosus discriminate between sex and individuals via their echolocation pulses alone, and researchers have found that the echolocation calls of R. clivosus have significant structural variations that may be helpful for reliable individual identification in large groups comprised of many individuals [ 27 ]. These studies reported that echolocation calls have a communicative function and play an important role in intraspecific social interactions [ 13 , 28 , 29 ]. However, while research on the acoustic communication of bats is rapidly growing, it still lags behind other mammalian taxa in general compared to the high species diversity of bats (over 1400 species worldwide [ 30 ]) [ 13 ].…”