There and back again: Homing in bats revisited
| Authors: | Erin F. Baerwald, Ted Weller, Dana M. Green, Richard A. Holland |
| Year: | 2021 |
| Type: | Book Chapter |
| Station: | Pacific Southwest Research Station |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54727-1_11 |
| Source: | 50 years of bat research. Chapter 11. |
Abstract
At the 1971 meeting North American Society for Bat Research (NASBR) in Albuquerque, Don Wilson and James S. Findley presented “Randomness in Bat Homing.” The central tenet of their paper was that homing ability in bats could be explained by chance alone or by some sort of random search [Wilson and Findley (Am Nat 106:418–424, 1972)]. In this retrospective, we assess the knowledge gained from, but also the limitations of, older studies on bat homing and review the advances in our understanding of homing and navigation in bats. Although we have learned much over the last half-century about the orientation and navigational abilities of bats, particularly our understanding of cues and spatial orientation, we still do not know if bats are capable of true navigation nor how they learn to do so. Partly because of technological advances, the study of homing has expanded from bats’ ability to return to roosts after being displaced short distances to determining how bats navigate and find destinations during long-distance seasonal migrations. We advocate for expansion of the study of navigation to include inter-seasonal movements and tropical areas and highlight the need to apply new knowledge of movement and navigation to the conservation of bats.
Homing refers to an animal’s ability to return to a known goal (e.g. a nest, roost, or den) after being displaced. The ability to home to familiar sites is both a fascination for the general public and the subject of intense study by scientists aiming to understand the mechanisms that govern it. The study of homing in various taxa, such as birds, insects, sea turtles, and salmonids, made significant advances during the past half-century leading to amazing discoveries about the capabilities of animals to navigate and the cues they use to do so. Despite these findings, an increase in technologies available to study small animals, and an increased interest in the topic of movement ecology, understanding of homing in bats has lagged behind other taxa (Holland 2019). Here we review the study of homing in bats over the last 50 years and argue for its continued importance, not only to understand the specifics of how bats navigate across the landscape, but also for the importance of applying this knowledge to improve conservation outcomes.