Léna de Framond-Benard

"Understand what animals say" is the little girl dream which motivated me to study sounds in biology. Often used as a tool to detect, identify and count species, I familiarized with acoustics and got curious about the biological functions and mechanisms involved in the animal use of sound signals.

Bats rely on high-frequency ultrasonic waves to orientate and forage. Ultrasound, however, does not reach very far because it is particularly strongly dampened by atmospheric attenuation. This phenomenon additionally varies with environmental parameters such as atmospheric temperature and humidity. Being able to detect obstacles and preys at a consistent distance might be a matter of survival for echolocating bats. In temperate regions, bats are subjected to significant seasonal variations in both temperature and humidity. My project aims to correlate echolocation call parameters with these two environmental conditions: to optimize foraging, we predict that bats adapt the frequency, duration and source level of their calls to the weather conditions.