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| ID: | 1205 | | Title: | Fruit Bats Are Not As Blind As You Think - http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/6-2007/fruit-bats-are-not-as-blind-as-you-think.html | | Description: |  The mammalian order bats (Chiroptera) has two suborders, microbats (Microchiroptera) and fruit bats or flying foxes (Megachiroptera). In contrast to microbats, fruit bats (Fig. 1) do not echolocate. They have large eyes and pronounced visual centres in the brain. Fruit bats need a good sense of vision, because when they forage at night for nectar and fruit, they orient by vision and the sense of smell. During the flights to the foraging grounds at dusk and the return to the daytime roost at dawn, the animals navigate solely by vision. On moonless nights, fruit bats cannot fly and stay hungry. Visual navigation at twilight and sometimes also during the daytime did not fit the older view that fruit bats only possess rods, the photoreceptors for night vision. This prompted Brigitte Müller and Leo Peichl of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt/Main and Steven Goodman from The Field Museum for Natural History in Chicago to study the photoreceptors of fruit bats with modern histological methods........ | | Category: | Biology | | Link Owner: | | | Date Added: | June 16, 2007 01:42:59 AM | | Number Hits: | 0 | | |
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