Скачать или смотреть Listening to the night: eavesdropping on communication in wild bats and mice

University of Alberta Sound Studies Institute 2020 Lecture Series 02:
Listening to the night: eavesdropping on communication in wild bats and mice.

Presented by Dr. Martina Kalcounis-Rueppell, Dean of Science at the University of Alberta.

There is an incredible diversity of species that are active and provide ecosystem services at night while we are asleep. Even if we were awake and outside in the middle of the night, we would not be able to see or hear these animals because they are active in the dark and the sounds that they produce to communicate with themselves and one another are at frequencies outside of the human range of hearing. These remarkable animals are bats and mice and they represent the most diverse groups of mammals on earth. Imagine if you could not see or hear birds? That is what we are missing by not having a window or speaker into the wonderful world of animal behaviour at night.

Dr. Kalcounis-Rueppell will discuss her field research program that has the overarching goal of characterizing the communication calls made by bats and mice and understanding how physiological and ecological state influence call production and how natural and human-made changes to the soundscape, in turn, influence the calling behaviours of bats and mice. These questions are important to understand because changes to our soundscape can have impacts on individuals that scale up to lost biodiversity and ecosystem services. Moreover, both bats and mice are relevant to human health and wellbeing because they are both biomedical models and zoonotic reservoirs.

Recorded live on zoom Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2020.