Bats Attracted to the Echoes of a Plant    [19-08-2011] In the forests of Cuba, there is a plant vine that needs bats in order to pollinate. Most flowers use brightly colored petals to attract pollinating animals to their nectar. Interestingly, the Marcgravia evenia plant vine uses sound. Like all bats, Pallas’ long-tongued bats, a South and Central American bat species, uses echolocation to navigate and find its food. Bat echolocation is when they detect and locate objects by sending out high-pitched sounds that reflect off the object and return to the animal's ears. The plant vine in Cuba uses this characteristic in bats to its advantage. Above their cluster of flowers, they have very big, dish-shaped leaves. These leaves bounce the sounds that the bat makes back to the bat in a very specific way. The bats recognize this particular echo as the plant vine and find it much more easily in the forest. The Marcgravia evenia plant is very rare and needs bats in order to pollinate. The bats live in a wide area and can carry pollen to different places. By having these big, hollow leaves, the plant is able to attract more bats at half the time that it would normally take for the bats to find regular-shaped plant leaves. In flowering plants, pollen is transferred usually by the wind or by animals. The research was done by Ralph Simon of Germany’s University of Ulm and Marc Holdereid of the U.K.’s University of Bristol. In their experiments, they hid feeders from the bats and tested to see how fast the bats could find the food. The feeders with the dish-shaped leaves were found about 50 percent faster. “We have looked at two bat-pollinated plants and found amazing things. We are expecting to find many more," said Holdereid.     출처: 어린이 영자신문 키즈타임즈 (www.kidstimes.net)