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Our new @VernesLab paper on #bat vocal learning is featured today in @newscientist! @EllaLatt (first author) is interviewed. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2240435-bats-can-learn-to-copy-sounds-and-it-may-teach-us-about-human-speech/">https://www.newscientist.com/article/2... @MPI_NL @maxplanckpress
The original paper can be found here on the @royalsociety Biology Letters website: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0928">https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.10...
In this work, @EllaLatt trained adult P. discolor bats to modify their social calls
As you can see in this picture, P.discolor #bats are quite social. They live in large groups and use a range of social calls to communicate with each other.
Previously, @EllaLatt explored the vocal repertoire in these bats in a social context, describing a rich repertoire and many different call types. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2019.00116/full">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/...
Ella also previously designed new behavioural paradigms for bats, based on work in birds, to show volitional control of social vocalisations and vocal usage learning in individual bats https://jeb.biologists.org/content/221/14/jeb180729">https://jeb.biologists.org/content/2... (published in @J_Exp_Biol)
Now in this new paper in @royalsociety Biol Letters, she built on these paradigms, training individual adult bats to modify their calls to match the properties of a playback they heard.
@EllaLatt showed that by playing back a social call with a lower pitch, over time, the bats would gradually reduce their pitch accordingly (with tasty banana as a reward!)
(Not our bats, but you get the idea of how much they like banana!) 
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To summarise, we showed that these bats can learn to modify their calls according to an acoustic template. This is called vocal learning and this skill has been very rarely shown in mammals. @EllaLatt and I discuss this in our recent Current Opinion paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154617301250?via%3Dihub">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a...
Vocal learning is something we humans need to learn how to speak, and while what we have shown in bats is a simple version of vocal learning, we think it can help us shed light on the biology of human speech and language. @MPI_NL @VernesLab @bat1kgenomes
All of this work is collected in the brilliant thesis of @EllaLatt
A thesis that @EllaLatt will defend on the 23rd April in a virtual defense at the @Radboud_Uni @mpi_nl https://www.mpi.nl/events/imprs-doctoral-defence-ella-z-lattenkamp">https://www.mpi.nl/events/im...
