Bats Love To Babble — Just Like Humans

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/19/ [login to see] /bats-love-to-babble-just-like-humans
Spend any time around a baby and you're likely to hear some babbling. Now, new research shows baby bats can do it too.

A paper published on Thursday in the latest issue of the journal Science finds similarities between the babbling of human infants and the babbling of the greater sac-winged bat (Saccopteryx bilineata) — a small species of bat that lives in Central and South America.

The researchers believe that bats and humans both evolved babbling as a precursor to more complex vocal behavior such as singing, or, in the case of people, talking.

"It's crazy," that two species which are so distantly related both babble, says Ahana Fernandez, an animal behavioral ecologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Germany.

Fernandez, a co-author on the new paper, hopes that the similarities in infant sounds might eventually reveal common genes used in the process of vocal learning.