Clear-Winged Woolly Bat Sings Like No Other

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This bat has the highest pitched call of any animal ever documented, putting even the best human sopranos to shame.

By Jennifer Viegas | Tue Mar 30, 2010 07:00 PM ET

The best human sopranos sing impressively high notes, but they cannot match the clear-winged woolly bat, which a new study has just determined produces the world's highest pitched call.

This bat and its Malaysian relatives also tie many other bats for being the world's fastest "talkers," since they all emit repeating echolocation calls at a rate of up to one vocalization every 5 milliseconds, according to the study, published in the latest issue of the Royal Society Biology Letters.

"A soprano singer might reach the A (note), which is 1.76 kilohertz," co-author Bjorn Siemers told Discovery News. "Our bats attained mean starting frequencies of 235 kilohertz and a maximum of 250, so it is safe to say that the bats produce tones that are 120 times higher than those of a human female singer."

Siemers, research leader of the Sensory Ecology Group at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, said the bats reach notes that are 8 octaves higher than what the best human sopranos can produce. The bats can also "sweep through a frequency range of up to 170 kilohertz," moving from lower to higher notes, "while a human singer produces a glissando through less than 2 kilohertz at most."

http://news.discovery.com/animals/clear-winged-woolly-bat.html