WHY SURFIN' BAT?
I am very broadly interested in the neuroethology of bats. How does the way they perceive their environment influence their behaviour and how did their behaviour shape their perception? Bats are a very successful clade of mammals. With over 1200 species they inhabit almost every corner of the world, and every imaginable food source. From mosquitoes to moths, beetles, spiders, over scorpions, birds, other mammals, frogs, fish to blood, fruit and nectar. The unique combination of flight and echolocation made it possible for them to exploit the lush ecological niche that is the night’s skies. Living their lives in darkness, bats have switched vision with echolocation as their main remote sense. I want to understand this immense reshaping of their sensory world and find answers to the question to what extent vision can even be replaced by a sensory system that originally evolved to complement it. The habitat I have chosen to study this question with is water, because water has some special properties....