Every summer evening 1.5 million bats emerge from underneath the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, on a quest for their favorite meals of mosquitoes and other insects. To track their tiny flying prey, the bats emit high-pitched sounds that deflect from an insect back to bat’s large ears. The information from this process of echolocation tells the flying mammals the precise path of their fast-moving food.
Image: A Harris’s hawk equipped with a camera and mic (see a close-up and video of this “biological drone,” below) flies among a swarm of bats as part of research on the animals’ sonar abilities. Credit: Laura Kloepper
