Casanova Critters: Male Bats Use Smooth Lovesongs to Attract Mates

Frank Sinatra's power animal may have been a bat. According to new research from Texas A&M University, the famed crooner and flying mammal have an unlikely thing in common in that they have learned to vocalize in a specific way to attract females.

Mike Smotherman, a leading bat expert and associate professor of biology at A&M, studied Mexican free-tailed bats in and around the university campus for three years, making thousands of recordings of bat serenades.

Smotherman found that the bats have more than just one smooth song to win over the ladies. Once the male bats capture the attention of a potential mate, they will literally change their tune and produce an array of more creative sounds to keep the females interested.

Luring in a lady bat with song not only requires a good tune: the male bats need good timing as well.

"These bats can fly very fast, almost 30 feet per second," Smotherman explained. "They only have about one-tenth of a second to get the females' attention.

"We learned that they use a very specific song to grab the female's attention as she flies by the roost. Once a bat joins their roost, the males mix up their songs, possibly to keep the females entertained long enough for mating to begin."

Smotherman notes the male free-tailed bat is able to quickly recognize their lovesong phrases and reorganize the musical structure of the series of chirpy syllables and phrases, which creates different singing styles.

"The males can be very creative in their singing," he said.

One explanation for why the bats are such vociferous singers is that, unlike songbirds, which have brightly colored feathers that can be used to attract a mate, the bats are not brilliantly plumed.

"Most other animals rely upon visual cues to attract a mate, such as birds having brightly colored feathers," Smotherman added. "With bats, it's all about sounds, which may be why bats use singing more than other mammals."

Smotherman and his colleagues' research is published in the journal Animal Behavior.