Babbling Bats: Like an Infant, These Animal Species Babble to Get Their Parents' Attention

If there's one similarity between a bat and an infant, that's the babbling sound they produce, a new study recently showed.

According to an NPR report, the research shows similarities between human infants and the greater sac-winged bath or Saccopteryx bilineata's babbling. The said bat species is a small kind of mammal living in Central and South America.

The study authors said they believe that both bats and humans evolved babbling as a precursor to more multifaceted vocal behavior like singing or talking in the case of humans.

Describing the finding, animal behavioral ecologist Ahana Fernandez at the Museum of National History in Berlin, Germany, said, "it's crazy" that two different distantly linked or associated species are both babbling.

A co-author of this new study, Fernandez hopes that the resemblances in infant sounds might eventually show common genes used in the vocal learning process.

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A Unique Babbling Sound

Fernandez described the greater sac-winged bat as a somewhat unassuming small creature. She added the bats are cute and they possess friendly faces.

The co-author also said she had spent innumerable hours observing bats and recording their sounds. To the human ear, she added that the bats' babbling could sound akin to a series of high-pitched repetitive chirps.

Typically, added the animal behavior expert, there's a colony where there are numerous bat pups, and then one of them begins babbling. She continued the baby bats bubble, sometimes for 40 minutes.

The babbling sound of the bat is unique. Even though songbirds and humans are bubbling, researchers have not discovered any other bat kind that babbles.

A similar Arab News report said it was the head of the behavioral ecology and bioacoustics laboratory of the museum, Mirjam Knörnschild, also the boss of Fernandez, who originally noticed that the bat pups were doing something with a sound similar to babbling.

Knörnschild said she thought what was heard sounded like human infants, and when Fernandez began to work with bats, she heard the same sound, as well. She described the sound as conspicuous and loud. And indeed, she said she also thought about babbling human infants.

Babbling, Possibly an Alternative to Crying

In their study, Babbling in a vocal learning bat resembles human infant babbling, published in the Science journal, the team seemed to meticulously show that this particular bat species babbles, explained Erich Jarvis, a New York-based Rockefeller University researcher, who's examining vocal learning in songbirds.

Jarvis also said the study findings are consistent with the hypothesis that babbling sound and vocal learning abilities go hand in hand.

Nonetheless, explained D. Kimbrough Oller, a School of Communication Sciences and Disorders professor at the University of Memphis, that leaves the question of how babbling developed in the first place.

Oller, who was not directly involved with the research added, one hypothesis is that the babbling sound started as a tactic to catch parents' attention, sans the aggravation of constant crying. By babbling, the professor elaborated, babies could not be gesturing their fitness and that they deserve to be attended to.

More so, once babbling is off the ground, Oller continued, it can provide a foundation for the adult of vocal abilities that can be used for other purposes.

Meaning, babbling may start as a mere substitute to crying, although it rapidly found a developmental use in vocal learning species, enabling infants to develop the abilities they'd need later in life.

Information about the babbling bats is shown on Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's YouTube video below: