AUSTIN, Texas—Like a diner ordering a dessert based solely on the “oohs” and “aahs” of a customer eating the same dish the next table over, frog-eating bats learn to eat new prey by eavesdropping on their neighbors as they eat, report biologists from The University of Texas at Austin.

Rachel Page and Mike Ryan, studying fringe-lipped bats at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, found that naïve bats quickly learned to associate a new frog call with edible prey by observing their neighbor eating, even when the call comes from a frog they wouldn’t normally eat. [read more]

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19 June 2006