The pallid bat lives in dry areas of western North America and listens for ground-dwelling insects before swooping down to catch them.
Its back is sandy brown to brown, its underside is pale, and it has large ears.
Pallid bats can locate prey by listening for sounds made by animals on the ground or other surfaces. In a 2021 experiment, researchers trained five bats captured in Idaho to find a cricket walking sound played from one of 21 speakers. Three bats completed the test trials in a flight room.
With background noise, the bats’ success in locating the prey sound fell to about half of the ambient-condition level, while search time nearly tripled. They also used 25% more sonar pulses. Similar changes occurred when noise either overlapped or did not overlap the prey sound, and the authors identified distraction as a main explanation.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
In the flight-room experiment, both noise treatments reduced prey-localization success for the three tested pallid bats and nearly tripled search time. The treatment that did not overlap the prey sound produced similar changes to the overlapping noise, supporting the authors’ conclusion that distraction mattered. They described reducing noise sources across landscapes as relevant to animals that rely on sound to find prey. The measured outcomes came from controlled flight-room trials.