Environmental acoustic cues guide the biosonar attention of a highly specialised echolocator

Sensory systems experience a trade-off between maximizing the detail and amount of sampled information. This trade-off is particularly pronounced in sensory systems that are highly specialised for a single task and thus experience limitations in other tasks. We hypothesised that combining sensory input from multiple streams of information may resolve this trade-off and improve detection and sensing reliability. Specifically, we predicted that perceptive limitations experienced by animals reliant on specialised active echolocation can be compensated for by the phylogenetically older and less specialised process of passive hearing. We tested this hypothesis in greater horseshoe bats, which possess morphological and neural specialisations allowing them to identify fluttering prey in dense vegetation using echolocation only. At the same time, their echolocation system is both spatially and temporally severely limited. Here, we show that greater horseshoe bats employ passive hearing to initially detect and localise prey-generated and other environmental sounds, and then raise vocalisation level and concentrate the scanning movements of their sonar beam on the sound source for further investigation with echolocation. These specialised echolocators thus supplement echo-acoustic information with environmental acoustic cues, enlarging perceived space beyond their biosonar range. Contrary to our predictions, we did not find consistent preferences for prey-related acoustic stimuli, indicating the use of passive acoustic cues also for detection of non-prey objects. Our findings suggest that even specialised echolocators exploit a wide range of environmental information, and that phylogenetically older sensory systems can support the evolution of sensory specialisations by compensating for their limitations.