The team trained bats to remain on a perch while tracking winged insects.
They recorded both the bats’ echolocation calls and head movements as they changed where the insects moved and how quickly.
In addition, they included obstacles that interrupted the echoes.
Clarice Anna Diebold, the study’s co-first author, said: “We devised mathematical models to test the data and we came up with different hypotheses of what the bats could be doing.”
If that bat failed to predict where the insect would be, its head movements would always lag behind the target.
However, this surprisingly was not the case – if a bat kept its head in a fixed position, which sometimes reflected where the insect ended-up, this would eliminate the prediction theory.
source: express.co.uk