In addition, naive juvenile bats that had never before encountered a water body showed spontaneous drinking responses from smooth plates. This provides the first evidence for innate recognition of a habitat cue in a mammal.

natselrox wrote:Interesting, eh Samsa?

With the bats’ response being so extremely stereotypical and repetitive, questions about learning arise. Do bats have to learn water recognition by following conspecifics, for example, their mother? The answer is no. By contrast, the spontaneous and repeated drinking attempts of the juvenile, naive bats strongly argue for an innate basis of the echoacoustic recognition of water bodies.

The one juvenile bat that did not attempt to drink from the metal plate also did not drink from the subsequently presented real water and thus probably lacked sufficient motivation.

Mr.Samsa wrote:

natselrox wrote:Interesting, eh Samsa?

Very

It looks like they've done a fairly decent job of demonstrating that this might be a fixed-action pattern, however they haven't explained how the bats have been drinking before the experiment took place. Surely they provided them with water through sipper bottles, otherwise the experiment was a bit of a waste of time, so I'm a bit confused as to why they've left this information out.. If they didn't use sipper bottles and simply gave them water in small troughs, then the results could be interpreted either way.

With the bats’ response being so extremely stereotypical and repetitive, questions about learning arise. Do bats have to learn water recognition by following conspecifics, for example, their mother? The answer is no. By contrast, the spontaneous and repeated drinking attempts of the juvenile, naive bats strongly argue for an innate basis of the echoacoustic recognition of water bodies.

I'm a little concerned by this statement as it hugely simplifies the process of learning. Okay, they've ruled out social learning by preventing them from flying with their mothers, but this obviously doesn't rule out learning..

So it's still a good study, and they've done some excellent work to provide support for it being a species-specific behavior (especially by identifying what stimulus was eliciting the drinking response) but I'd still like to see a few more details. In particular, this sentence should give us reason for a moment's hesitation:

The one juvenile bat that did not attempt to drink from the metal plate also did not drink from the subsequently presented real water and thus probably lacked sufficient motivation.

As it stands, if a water trough was used between sessions to keep them hydrated, then all of the results can be explained by basic stimulus control (and it would also explain why one didn't engage in the drinking behavior, despite being water deprived, as its behavior was probably controlled by some other cue other than the echolocation effect).

natselrox wrote:Hmm... Might be interesting to ask this to the authors. I'll try.

natselrox wrote:That struck me as well. Surely there are ways of learning the same trick through a variety of different techniques.

natselrox wrote:It outwitted the researchers, you say?

Mr.Samsa wrote:

natselrox wrote:That struck me as well. Surely there are ways of learning the same trick through a variety of different techniques.

Indeed, and social learning is one of the most complex forms of learning, so it seems strange to eliminate the most unlikely form of learning and declare that it necessarily rules out all kinds of learning.

natselrox wrote:Probably they were raised in complete isolation.

I just mailed them both the questions. Will post the reply.

Dear [myname],

thank you for your interest and of course I'm happy to answer your questions.

If we would have used little bowls of water for raising the youngs, I would agree with you. However we raised the juveniles initially with the help of their mothers. That means we handfed (and watered) the mothers who then let their pups feed on milk. When the young ones were old enough we also handfed them and watered them with a water pipette. So they indeed nether saw a smooth water surface before.

Very little is known about social learning in bats. As far as we know they generally fly alone (with exceptions, see Dechmann 2009 'Experimental evidence for group hunting via eavesdropping in echolocating bats'). Even less is known about mother-infant interactions. I actually believe that probably in many species the mother will fly loosely together with their infants and thereby showing them the 'map' of area with all the important areas. So far so good, but when the young bat is in the respective area it has to know what to do (foraging, drinking). Because - as far as we understand it - it is not possible for one animal to evaluate the echolocation calls of the other animal and thereby understand what that one is doing. I don't want to rule out social learning as we are just at the beginning of investigating this, but what my data clearly shows is, that it is not necessary at least for recognizing water (and maybe catch insects) as the young ones independently knew immediately what to do.

I hope I could answer your questions and if you have more, don't hesitate to write again.


All the best,
Stefan

natselrox wrote:I could have formed my question better.

natselrox wrote:Still doesn't prove that it's an FAP but I guess we will have to make do with this much. The study did not look much deeper, I guess.