Frog-eating bats can form long-term memories, study using phone ringtones discovers

By Jason Goodyer

Published: Tuesday, 21 June 2022 at 12:00 am

This isn’t the first thing that springs to mind when you hear the term ‘bat phone’: researchers at Ohio State University have shown that frog-eating bats can form long-term memories by training them to associate food rewards with phone ringtones.

The team initially exposed 49 lab-based frog-eating bats to a recording of the mating call of the male túngara frog, one of their favourite snacks, and rewarded them with a tasty piece of fish when they flew to it.

Over time, the researchers merged a ringtone into the call until it was completely replaced, but kept the fish reward the same. They then exposed the bats to three other ringtones that were not connected to food rewards to test their behaviour.

Each bat eventually learned which ringtone signalled the food reward and stopped flying towards the unrewarded sounds. After periods varying from 11 to 27 days, the researchers microchipped the bats and released them into the wild.

Then, over the following four years, the team recaptured eight of the trained bats and tested their responses to the reward ringtone. All eight quickly flew to the sound expecting a reward.