Toward Community-Driven Big Open Brain Science: Open Big Data and Tools for Structure, Function, and Genetics.

As acquiring bigger data becomes easier in experimental brain science, computational and statistical brain science must achieve similar advances to fully capitalize on these data. Tackling these problems will benefit from a more explicit and concerted effort to work together. Specifically, brain science can be further democratized by harnessing the power of community-driven tools, which both are built by and benefit from many different people with different backgrounds and expertise.

Echo interval and not echo intensity drives bat flight behavior in structured corridors.

To navigate in the natural environment, animals must adapt their locomotion in response to environmental stimuli. The echolocating bat relies on auditory processing of echo returns to represent its surroundings. Recent studies have shown that echo flow patterns influence bat navigation, but the acoustic basis for flight path selection remains unknown.

Echolocation and flight behavior of the bat in a structured corridor.

In this study, the echolocation and flight behaviors of the Taiwanese leaf-nosed bat (), which uses constant-frequency (CF) biosonar signals combined with a frequency-modulated (FM) sweep, are compared with those of the big brown bat (), which uses FM signals alone. The CF-FM bat flew through a corridor bounded by vertical poles on either side, and the inter-pole spacing of the walls was manipulated to create different echo flow conditions. The bat's flight trajectories and echolocation behaviors across corridor conditions were analyzed.

Tongue-driven sonar beam steering by a lingual-echolocating fruit bat.

Animals enhance sensory acquisition from a specific direction by movements of head, ears, or eyes. As active sensing animals, echolocating bats also aim their directional sonar beam to selectively "illuminate" a confined volume of space, facilitating efficient information processing by reducing echo interference and clutter. Such sonar beam control is generally achieved by head movements or shape changes of the sound-emitting mouth or nose.

Tight coordination of aerial flight maneuvers and sonar call production in insectivorous bats.

Echolocating bats face the challenge of coordinating flight kinematics with the production of echolocation signals used to guide navigation. Previous studies of bat flight have focused on kinematics of fruit and nectar-feeding bats, often in wind tunnels with limited maneuvering, and without analysis of echolocation behavior. In this study, we engaged insectivorous big brown bats in a task requiring simultaneous turning and climbing flight, and used synchronized high-speed motion-tracking cameras and audio recordings to quantify the animals' coordination of wing kinematics and echolocation.

Bats coordinate sonar and flight behavior as they forage in open and cluttered environments.

Echolocating bats use active sensing as they emit sounds and listen to the returning echoes to probe their environment for navigation, obstacle avoidance and pursuit of prey. The sensing behavior of bats includes the planning of 3D spatial trajectory paths, which are guided by echo information. In this study, we examined the relationship between active sonar sampling and flight motor output as bats changed environments from open space to an artificial forest in a laboratory flight room.