Feindel Seminar Series: From sensory perception to foraging decision making, studying bats in the real world
From sensory perception to foraging decision making, studying bats in the real world
With ~1500 species, bats are considered the most diverse taxa of mammals. Many bats are amazing navigators. Some species nightly commute dozens of kilometres in search of food, and some species annually migrate over thousands of kilome-tres. Studying bats in their natural environment has always been extremely chal-lenging because of their small size (mostly <50 gr) and agile nature. To overcome this challenge, we have developed miniature sensors allowing us to GPS-tag small bats, while also recording their echolocation sound signals, thus opening a new window to document their behaviour in the wild. We have used this technology to track blind-folded bats, showing that they can create acoustic cognitive maps. Using sequence-learning neural networks, we model this behavior showing how acoustic-based maps could be generated by self-learning. We moreover used the approach to demonstrate how mother bats facilitate the acquisition of navigation by young pups and to show that bats track the time since their last visit to a forag-ing site. Altogether, this approach enables us to study bats’ sensorimotor decision making in the real world.
Yossi Yovel, School of Zoology, Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel-Aviv University
Yossi Yovel is Professor in the School of Zoology and in the School of Neuroscience in Tel-Aviv University (TAU). He received a B.Sc. in Physics, a BSc in Biology and a M.Sc. in Neuroscience from Tel-Aviv University; and a Ph.D. in Biological cybernetics from The University of Tuebingen, Germany where he applied Machine Learning techniques for classification of Bio-sonar echoes. Before joining Tel-Aviv University as a faculty member, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Weizmann Institute of Sciences and in the University of Chicago. Yovel leads the Bio-sonar lab in Tel-Aviv University where he studies bat bio-sonar and its application in robotics using state-of-the-art audio and video recording arrays. The lab develops miniature sensors (the smallest in the world of their kind) that can be mounted on echolocating bats in the field. The lab focuses on NeuroEcology - a combination of Neuroscience and Ecology trying to bridge the gap between these two huge disciplines by performing highly controlled experiments in the field. Yovel is the author of more than 30 peer-reviewed publications. He is a recipient of various excellence awards such as the Alon Scholarship and the Krill Prize.
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