Wingbeat synchronization in Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis)


SOCIETY FOR INTEGRATIVE AND COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY
2021 VIRTUAL ANNUAL MEETING (VAM)
January 3 – Febuary 28, 2021

Meeting Abstract


5-1  Sat Jan 2  Wingbeat synchronization in Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) Fullerton, JA*; Weesner, AT; Bentley, I; Kloepper, LN; Saint Mary’s College; Saint Mary’s College; Saint Mary’s College; Saint Mary’s College lkloepper@saintmarys.edu

Animals in nature move in groups often with often remarkable coordination including starling murmuration and fish schooling. Bats also exhibit coordinated group movement during foraging and navigation, and are especially interesting because they primarily navigate with echolocation. Additionally, recent work has suggested that bats have sensory hairs on their wings that aid in flight coordination. Bats have also been recorded to pair during flight in a “leader-follower” relationship based on their flight trajectories, but the kinematics behind the pairing is unknown. Motivated by prior observations, we investigated the flight dynamics for pairs of bats engaged in leader-follower relationships that appeared to have synchronized wingbeats. Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) were recorded with a thermal imaging camera while they performed nightly emergences from a cave located on private land in Oklahoma. Bat pairs with observed synchronization were extracted for digital video analysis. Using anatomical landmarks digitized in the DLTdv8 MATLAB application, we quantified the flight trajectory, position, and wingbeat dynamics of bat pairs as they moved through the camera’s field of view. We report on the degree of wingbeat synchrony and discuss the advantages such synchrony could provide during group flight.

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