New website calls for help from bat detectives

Scientists are asking for the public's help to monitor bats across Europe and track changes in our environment by listening to their weirdly wonderful ultrasonic tweets on a new website. The Bat Detective website allows visitors to take part in conservation by listening out for bat tweets in recordings collected over 80,000 km of roads across Europe by thousands of volunteers from the iBats programme, including bat recordings from the heart of Transylvania. By sorting the sounds in the recordings into insect and bat calls, bat detectives will help biologists learn how to reliably distinguish bat tweets to develop new automatic identification tools. "Bats use lots of different types of sounds, from singing to each other to find a mate, to using the echoes from their tweets to find their way around," said Professor Kate Jones from UCL and Chair of the Bat Conservation Trust. She added: "Usually bat sounds are inaudible to humans as they are too high for us to hear, but special 'time expansion' ultrasonic detectors convert these sounds to a lower frequency. Visitors to the Bat Detective website can listen to these unique recordings and help us distinguish different sounds." - Visitors to the Bat Detective website can listen to unique recordings and help us distinguish different sounds. Professor Kate Jones One out of every four species of bats is threatened with extinction and better automatic identification tools are desperately needed to quickly process vast amounts of sound data collected by volunteers from the bat monitoring programme iBats who survey bat populations each year.