Common Big-eared Bat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scientific classification | ||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
| Micronycteris microtis Miller, 1898 |
The Common Big-eared Bat, Micronycteris microtis, is a bat species from South and Central America. It is a neotropical leaf-nosed bat Phyllostomidae where recent results have demonstrated that this bat has an amazing capability of finding motionless food within clutter.
It has beeen shown that echolocating bats discriminate between background and prey based on glints or Doppler shifts in the echo induced by the (wing-)movements of the prey, but M. microtis can detect completely motionless prey. M. microtis shares the noseleaf and the sound emission through the nostrils with the rest for the Phyllostomidae family, but its behavior is unique, as far as we know. M. microtis is able to discriminate ecologically relevant stimuli within an extremely complex cluttered sonic environment.
The echolocation call of M. microtis is a broad band multi-harmonic FM sweep with most energy in the second harmonic between 95 and 75 kHz, i.e. quite similar to that of Macrophyllum macrophyllum, although presumably of lower intensity.
[edit] References
 |
This article about a bat is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
