Rockin’ Out: Bats Learn to Love Heavy Metal Music

Bat researcher and postdoctoral fellow, Inga Geipel from the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama has trained fringe-lipped bats, Trachops cirrhosus, to come back to her, after being released into the wild, by playing heavy metal music. While heavy metal music may not be everyone’s first choice, Geipel choose this type of music due to its similarity to the mating call of the tungara frog, the fringe-lipped bats favorite food.

By training the fringe-lipped bats to come back to the music, Geipel will be able to conduct her research on echolocation, investigating how bats alter their sonar abilities according to their surroundings. So far, the experiment has had a high success rate with three out of four bats returning to the music.

You can read more about this experiment here.