Role of auditory feedback for vocal production learning in the Egyptian fruit bat

Abstract

Some species have evolved the ability to use the sense of hearing to modify existing vocalizations, or even create new ones, which enlarges their repertoires and results in complex communication systems.¹ This ability corresponds to various forms of vocal production learning that are all possessed by humans and independently displayed by distantly related vertebrates.^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7} Among mammals, a few species, including the Egyptian fruit bat,^8,9,10 would possess such vocal production learning abilities.⁷ Yet the necessity of an intact auditory system for the development of the Egyptian fruit bat typical vocal repertoire has not been tested. Furthermore, a systematic causal examination of learned and innate aspects of the entire repertoire has never been performed in any vocal learner. Here we addressed these gaps by eliminating pups’ sense of hearing at birth and assessing its effects on vocal production in adulthood. The deafening treatment enabled us to both causally test these bats’ vocal learning ability and discern learned from innate aspects of their vocalizations. Leveraging wireless individual audio recordings from freely interacting adults, we show that a subset of the Egyptian fruit bat vocal repertoire necessitates auditory feedback. Intriguingly, these affected vocalizations belong to different acoustic groups in the vocal repertoire of males and females. These findings open the possibilities for targeted studies of the mammalian neural circuits that enable sexually dimorphic forms of vocal learning.