(Credit: Brock Fenton)
(CNN) -
Bats are often unfairly portrayed as blood-sucking vermin.
But the researchers studying them prefer you to think of them as the highly intelligent and largely benevolent creatures that they are.
A team from Johns Hopkins University has a new argument to defend bats: These winged mammals can predict the future.
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Insect-eating bats use echoes to create a 3D model of the world around them as they fly in pursuit of prey.
And they use those snapshots of the world to predict the path of their prey, according to a study published this week in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
.
So while bats aren't actually clairvoyant, those that track insects are extremely accurate hunters that rely on more than just visual cues.
Cynthia Moss, a senior researcher at Johns Hopkins Batlab, professor of brain and psychological sciences and lead author of this week's study, said the findings could inform how scientists understand how humans perceive and process information as well. .
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"We study bats, but we're actually more interested in bigger, more general questions," he told CNN.
"One question is how animals, including humans, can use the information they receive through their senses and process it over time to make predictions about what will happen in the future," he explained.
How do bats make predictions?
That quick prediction is something athletes are especially adept at, Moss said, but they have an advantage that bats don't: They can follow the ball as it travels without interruption, flies through the air or bounces off a court.
Bats, which often chase their prey in the dark, are hampered by trees that block their echoes.
Bats hunt using echolocation, a process by which they emit ultrasonic calls and use the information from the returning echoes, such as how long it takes for the echo to bounce back to them, to create a "3D record of the world around them." Clarice Diebold, study co-author and PhD candidate, told CNN.
But there are gaps in those models of the world, as the echoes bounce off trees and other objects in the path of bats.
So Moss, Diebold, and co-author Angeles Salles tested whether bats could take those discrete snapshots to put together a predictive model of where the object they are chasing will end up, in the same way that a baseball player in the field might try to catch one. flying ball, only instead of relying on vision, bats rely on hearing.
The Batlab team test
The Batlab team trained the bats to sit on a platform in their laboratory while controlling the path of the insect that the bats would chase.
The environment allowed the researchers to control the speed at which the insect was moving, and then they closely observed the bats with a high-speed camera.
"What we found was that the bats were not just using the information from the returning echo, they were actually estimating where the target would be at a future point," Diebold said.
READ: Bats: 6 surprising facts about why they are not our enemies
The bats did this by estimating the speed at which the insect was moving, as well as the position where the target should end up, even when echolocation was momentarily blocked, he said.
"We found that bats can predict when prey will reappear when they temporarily lose it behind the mess," said Salles, a postdoctoral fellow.
How could this research on bats help humans?
Moss acknowledged that people may find the laboratory's emphasis on bats as "quirky" or highly specialized.
But bats are strong test subjects when it comes to testing hypotheses about the human condition, he said.
"Bats are actually very special creatures," Moss said.
"They may hold the clues to unravel many of the problems humans face," he explained.
Some of the techniques bats use to hunt in the dark are shared by blind people, who can use their own form of echolocation by tapping a stick or flicking their tongue to create a picture of the world around them.
Like bats, blind people can follow objects as they move by hearing the changes in echoes over time.
And by understanding the processes through which bats make those predictions with their ears to successfully reach their prey, Moss said, researchers can better understand how to develop devices that help blind people do the same.
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