| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Amanda Adams, Ph.D. aadams@bio.tamu.edu Biology |
| Faculty Mentor: | Michael Smotherman, Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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Spring 2017: TBD |
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Team Size:
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3 (Team Full) |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Earning co-authorship on publications.
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Team Needs:
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We are looking for students with a diverse range of skills who want to be part of a team to accomplish this research. A few components of the project team members will work on: – analyzing bat 3D flight paths with stereo videography. We are looking for individuals with experience in computer vision with MATLAB and/or LABView. – developing a bilingual educational website to pair with this research. We need individuals interested in creating website content, website design, and graphic design. – Statistical analysis, mathematical modeling of animal behavior – Animal care, specifically sophomores and juniors who are interested in working with and handling bats in behavioral experiments and can help with animal care, such as feeding. |
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Description:
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For more than 60 years researchers have puzzled over how echolocating bats avoid interfering with each other’s sonar while flying in dense swarms or within crowded roosts. Man-made sonar and radar systems face similar problems, but the bat’s exceptional resilience to jamming by conspecifics far exceeds the strategies currently employed in artificial systems. We are working to explain how groups of bats manage this extraordinary feat. We study bats’ flight, echolocation, and behavior in the lab at TAMU. By revealing important, new mechanisms by which bats compensate for noise, the results help predict how different types of anthropogenic noise impact bat behavioral ecology and therefore can help guide bat conservation efforts worldwide. |