Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
Recently, I wrote a post on how bats used sound to recognize individual prey items based on breathing patterns. Today, Science Daily has a story on bats using sound to transmit cultural information.
The above is a picture of a fringe-lipped bat eating a frog. According to Science Daily:
To observe the cultural transmission of this new information in the bats, Page and Ryan captured wild fringe-lipped bats and tested them in large outdoor flight cages. They played the calls of large, poisonous cane toads through speakers and gave the bats that approached the speaker a reward of raw fish. Once a bat learned to associate the cane toad call with food, they became "tutor" bats.Naïve bats were then allowed to observe the tutor bats. The naïve bats, on average, learned to associate the new frog call with food after observing their tutor five times. Page and Ryan believe the naïve bat observes the tutor's location through echolocation and then listens to it chewing on its prey.
"There have been many of studies on diet and learning, but most have been conducted with laboratory animals," said Page. "This study is exciting because we are taking wild bats, bringing them into an outdoor flight cage and within a matter of days observing social learning and innovative foraging behavior.
Leaving aside the aspect of "culture" the study is interesting because of the implications for conservation:
"This study has interesting conservation implications," said Page. "For a predator that is specialized to feed on a group of animals facing catastrophic extinctions (for example, frogs), it is important to know what type of response these bats might show to drastic changes in prey abundance and composition. Our study suggests that at least in terms of foraging ecology, frog-eating bats could rapidly track fluctuations in the prey community."
Finally, there are evolutionary implications. As I mentioned, the researchers actually trained the bats to respond to the canebrake toad and remark:
"It is stunning that these bats show such rapid changes in their responses to prey cues, to the extent that they will respond to a stimulus that they should be under strong selective pressure to avoid in the wild[emphasis mine- afarensis]," said Page. "This result is very unexpected and shows an extreme degree of flexibility."
The research is being published in Current Biology.
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Comments
That is very cool. One of my professors is a big bat person. I will have send him the link...
Posted by: Meta_Analysis | June 20, 2006 9:33 PM
"The naïve bat observes the tutor's location through... [listening] to it chewing on its prey".
^^^That phrase is the creepiest thing I've ever heard in my life.
Posted by: Roberto CA | June 21, 2006 12:27 AM
Meta Analysis - Bats are more of an amateur interest of mine. I don't know that much about them, but the more I find out the cooler they get. One of these days I'm actually going to have to spend some time and learn more about them...
Roberto - Definitely part of their charm...
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | June 21, 2006 12:34 AM