Mother bats' hearts beat faster at the sound of their own babies' cries
A study on Japanese house bats reveals that mothers experience increased heart rates when hearing the distress calls of their own offspring. This physiological response highlights the biological mechanisms that enable mothers to distinguish and prioritize their own pups in a crowded colony.
Why it matters
Understanding these behavioral and physiological traits provides insight into maternal care and evolutionary survival strategies in mammals.
edited by Swati Mestri , reviewed by Robert Egan
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Add to Preferred Sources Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A mother bat has one crucial challenge: find her own babies among hundreds of other bats in the colony. Making sure she cares for and nurses only her own offspring is important to ensuring their survival. Among Japanese house bats, mothers keep track of their pups using the babies' isolation calls.
To understand how these calls affect the mothers, the researchers monitored changes in the heart rates of mother bats presented with calls from their own babies and other bats' babies. Although the mother bats didn't react to calls from other bats' pups, the sound of their own pups made their hearts beat faster.
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