Animal Sciences Commons^™

Noise Distracts Foraging Bats, Louise C. Allen, Nickolay I. Hristov, Juliette J. Rubin, Joseph T. Lightsey, Jesse R. Barber

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Predators frequently must detect and localize their prey in challenging environments. Noisy environments have been prevalent across the evolutionary history of predator–prey relationships, but now with increasing anthropogenic activities noise is becoming a more prominent feature of many landscapes. Here, we use the gleaning pallid bat, Antrozous pallidus, to investigate the mechanism by which noise disrupts hunting behaviour. Noise can primarily function to mask—obscure by spectrally overlapping a cue of interest, or distract—occupy an animal's attentional or other cognitive resources. Using band-limited white noise treatments that either overlapped the frequencies of a prey cue or did not …