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MUSICAL CREATURES

Tiny Bats Play Music With Leaves

Cute, right?

It’s not as stupid as it sounds. A tiny species of bat—they only weigh four grams each!—has been found to use folded leaves as “trumpets” to amplify ingoing and outgoing calls to others bat friends. Several of the little guys can crowd inside a single leaf, which they often to do avoid weather or predators. But the new discovery is that the leaves act as a way to “increase sound intensity” from the outside. The downside? The leaves can distort the calls, so the little bats can’t tell whether the calls are going from friends or strangers Talk about the cutest game of telephone ever.

Read it at National Geographic

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