Sensory systems used by echolocating bats foraging in natural settings

In the natural world, foraging bats exploit a rich array of sensory cues. Bats have evolved sensory systems that allow them access to diverse food sources in a wide range of environments, from tropical to temperate and desert to mountain. These systems include echolocation, passive listening, vision, olfaction, thermoreception, and mechanosensation, which collectively enable foraging success. Some species benefit from multimodal information carried by different sensory systems to localize and identify food sources, particularly when acoustic clutter and background noise interfere with stimulus detection and discrimination. Here, we present an overview of the sensory information bats exploit to locate food such as insects, fruit, nectar and pollen, small vertebrates, and blood.