Did You Know? Bats Constantly Argue Over Food, Sex and Bed.
If you flip a photo of bats hanging upside down, it would look like they’re having a killer dance-off.
Humans have been trying to understand animals since the beginning of civilization. Sometimes, we’re dying to figure out what they’re actually saying. Pet owners might have already voiced for them since god-knows-when.
Dogs and cats might be easier to understand and even train due to our domestication, but others might be a bit challenging. Bats, in particular, intrigued scientists.
So they did some nerdy stuff to bats. They took bat sounds and processed them through voice recognition / AI software and found out that bats aren’t just randomly screaming. They’re fighting. (Hmmm, not if you scream too when YOU fight, though.)
However, voice technology recognizes only 60% of bat sounds. The remaining 40% is still a mystery. The “arguments,” considering environmental factors, come down to dialogues such as fighting for food, bed, and complaining about how crowded it is in the cave. And, of course, also the female bats loudly rejecting creepy, pervy bat dudes.
What’s so groundbreaking about #Fact135 is discovering bats have their own language. This means there are signs of syntax, phonology and perhaps semantics too.
For example, they’d change voices depending on who, where and what they’re “saying.”
If you need a friendly reminder to understand how this works, try to recall the times when you’re talking to your crush. Your pitch just goes higher. When talking to your mom? Let’s not go there.
According to our knowledge, only dolphins and monkey are smart enough to develop their own language like this.
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