The Role of Tragus in Echolocating Bat, Eptescus fuscus
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This research is being conducted by
Chen Chiu with Cynthia Moss.
There are two major components of the bat's external ears, the pinna and tragus. The role of tragus is generally believed as vertical sound localization. The purpose of this study is to further examine how the tragus manipulation will affect a free-flying bat's prey capture and obstacles avoidance behavior. The first part of this study is prey capture experiment and the second part is wire avoidance experiment. In both experiments, the bat would perform the tasks in three different conditions: with intact tragus, tragus-deflected and recover from tragus-deflected.