Studying insect-eating bats isn’t easy: they’re tiny, fly at night, and navigate using ultrasonic frequencies far above human hearing range. But experts in India have come up with a potential solution to make long-duration bat research easier: they’ve devised an automated, solar-powered instrument called BatEchoMon that continuously listens for bat calls in the surrounding landscape, and relays the data back to researchers in near-real time, reports contributor Aisiri Amin for Mongabay India.

Bat biologist Kadambari Deshpande and technologist Vedant Barje, who developed BatEchoMon last October, have installed two of the devices on private farms in the western state of Maharashtra. Their goal is to monitor insectivorous bats and understand the role they play in agro-systems. “For instance, insectivorous bats control agricultural insect pests of several crops, and thus contribute to the protection of yields from pest-driven losses,” Deshpande told Mongabay India.

To study insectivorous bats, researchers generally rely on handheld devices called bat detectors. Whenever a bat flies by, the detector’s microphone picks up the high-frequency sounds the mammals use to navigate and find food. The device then displays the calls as graphs on the detector’s screen, with each bat species having a unique call signature. But there are a few challenges: there isn’t yet a comprehensive reference resource for Indian bats’ calls as many species remain unrecorded, and sorting out bat calls from background noise, as well as analyzing the data, can be a long-drawn-out process, Amin reports.

Answering ecological questions also requires listening for bats over long periods of time, which is challenging with detectors alone. So, Deshpande and Barje configured BatEchoMon to activate automatically at sunset, when insectivorous bats begin flying for food, and record continuously for several hours. The device includes both detectors and microcomputers to record and process nearby bat calls.

“It is a system that includes bat detectors and processes data as it is being recorded, and analyses species-wise bat activity on the fly so that scientists can directly get bat activity summaries in real time,” Barje told Mongabay India. “It also generates different statistics such as which species has been most active through the night, which species was active when, and so on, providing the total number of species present in the area throughout the recording period.”

Additionally, BatEchoMon uses solar panels to charge its batteries, and manufacturing the device costs about one-third that of advanced bat detectors available in other countries, Amin reports.

However, the lack of enough training datasets still remains a hurdle. “[Other] bat researchers can help make the system more robust by contributing training data,” Deshpande said. She added that once there’s enough training data, the devices can be made more accessible for citizen scientists to monitor bats around them.

Read the full story by Aisiri Amin on Mongabay India.

Banner image of a horseshoe bat in Maharashtra by Everestsh via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).