Vocal Recognition Between Mothers And Pups In Hipposideros Pomona

Maternal recognition is an important part of the animal community exchanging conducives to reveal its function and adaptive evolution capabilities to identify signals. Many birds and mammals, due to the large selection pressure and other factors, there is often a mutual recognition between mother and child. Bat as the only one mammal species can fly, the main use of acoustic signals are communication and preying in the darkness, some reports showed that the mother bat through isolation calls could identified their infants unidirectionally. However, few studies focus on the young bats being able to identify the mother bat by acoustic cues in the field. Further, the possibility of the offspring identifying its mother by female bats’ directive call waves is lack of strict playback experiments to verify.In this paper, we used leaf-nosed bat{Hipposideros pomona) for the study, used of statistical methods and playback experiments, carried out research on acoustic signal recognition between mother and infant, mainly to solve the following two scientific questions:(1) whether the juvenile bats’ isolation calls have individual characteristics, as well as the mother bat recognize individual offspring through acoustic characteristics of infants;(2) whether there exits the mother bat’s sonic characteristics of individuals, as well as the possibility of juveniles using female bats’ the individual characteristics of sound waves to identify the parent, that if there is a two-way recognition between mother and infant. The results showed that:the young bats’isolation calls were with individual acoustic characteristics significantly, discriminant score of79.4%, all of the playbacks of isolation calls, the mother bats could be generated for the young bat sonic sound chemotactic response, but for the other acoustic playback types, parent has no effect; Two kinds of Sound waves emitted by the female bats in the reunion process with the young, the corresponding order discriminant scores reached79.8%and70.3%, which means that individual acoustic characteristics were significantly higher than the random (16.7%, binomial test:P<0.0001), as juveniles growing, they could distinguish different mother bats according to emiting exclusive sound waves of mother bats in recognition. The result showed that own infant performed a stronger reaction to the D-call than the alien, there was a significant difference in the number of isolation calls after2weeeks of age(Wilcoxon signed-ranks test:Z=-2.951, P=0.003), for echolocation, the difference was not significant (all P>0.05).But for the infants did not recognize the mother’s D-call less than two weeks of age(Wilcoxon signed-ranks test:Z=-0.282, P=0.778).The study firstly verfied that infant could recognize its own mother bat by D-calls,which stimulied the recognition between the mother and infant in the filed, thereby which strengthened the recognition efficiency of both conducive to further the survival and reproduction of female bats. We compared different bat species’models of maternal recognition in different ecological habits with ours, which could help understand the revolution of the function and adopt under the selection pressure in vocal signals.