Many animal species, including many species of bats, exhibit collective behavior where groups of individuals coordinate their motion. Bats are unique among these animals in that they use the active sensing mechanism of echolocation as their primary means of navigation. Due to their use of echolocation in large groups, bats run the risk of signal interference from sonar jamming. However, several species of bats have developed strategies to prevent interference, which may lead to different behavior when flying with conspecifics than when flying alone. This study seeks to explore the role of this acoustic sensing on the behavior of bat pairs flying together. Field data from a maternity colony of gray bats (Myotis grisescens) were collected using an array of cameras and microphones. These data were analyzed using the information theoretic measure of transfer entropy in order to quantify the interaction between pairs of bats and to determine the effect echolocation calls have on this interaction. This study expands on previous work that only computed information theoretic measures on the 3D position of bats without echolocation calls or that looked at the echolocation calls without using information theoretic analyses. Results show that there is evidence of information transfer between bats flying in pairs when time series for the speed of the bats and their turning behavior are used in the analysis. Unidirectional information transfer was found in some subsets of the data which could be evidence of a leader–follower interaction.

中文翻译：

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使用位置和回声定位数据对蝙蝠之间的相互作用进行传递熵分析

许多动物物种，包括许多种类的蝙蝠，表现出集体行为，其中个体群体协调他们的运动。蝙蝠在这些动物中是独一无二的，因为它们使用回声定位的主动感知机制作为其主要导航手段。由于它们在大群体中使用回声定位，蝙蝠面临声纳干扰造成信号干扰的风险。然而，几种蝙蝠已经制定了防止干扰的策略，这可能会导致与同种飞行时与单独飞行时不同的行为。本研究旨在探索这种声学传感对一起飞行的蝙蝠对的行为的作用。使用一系列相机和麦克风收集来自灰蝙蝠（Myotis grisescens）母体群体的现场数据。使用传递熵的信息理论测量对这些数据进行了分析，以量化成对蝙蝠之间的相互作用并确定回声定位呼叫对这种相互作用的影响。这项研究扩展了之前的工作，即只计算蝙蝠 3D 位置的信息理论测量值而没有回声定位呼叫，或者在不使用信息理论分析的情况下查看回声定位呼叫。结果表明，当分析中使用蝙蝠速度及其转动行为的时间序列时，有证据表明成对飞行的蝙蝠之间存在信息传递。在数据的某些子集中发现了单向信息传输，这可能是领导者与追随者互动的证据。