News in Brief: Bats are 3-D cartographers

News in Brief: Bats are 3-D cartographers

Special cells in the mammal?s brain chart its path as it flies

By Meghan Rosen

Web edition: April 18, 2013

Special cells in the mammal?s brain chart its path as it flies

By Meghan Rosen

Web edition: April 18, 2013

Enlarge

Flying Mapmaker

The Egyptian fruit bat (pictured) uses neurons called place cells to draw mental maps of 3-D spaces.

Credit: Courtesy of Organization for Bat Conservation and Steve Gettle Photography

Holy flying fruit bats!

Neurons called place cells help Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, navigate three-dimensional spaces, researchers report April 18 in Science.

Enlarge

An Egyptian fruit bat (shown in an illustration) wears a monitoring device on its head to record neural activity.

Credit: Sharon Kaufman, Science

By implanting electrodes in the bats? brains and strapping on lightweight wireless recording devices to their heads, researchers measured neural activity as the animals flew up, down and around a room. Individual place cells perked up when bats zoomed through particular spaces, report Michael Yartsev and Nachum Ulanovsky of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

Just as spots on a map represent locations, each place cell represented a specific area of the room. Like cartographers charting new lands on paper, bats sketch mental maps of spaces they fly through. But unlike cartographers ? or rats, which researchers have studied walking across flat surfaces ? bats use their place cells to move through three dimensions.

---

Citations

M.M. Yartsev and N. Ulanovsky. Representation of three-dimensional space in the hippocampus of flying bats. Science. Vol. 340, April 19, 2013, p. 367. doi:10.1126/science.1235338. [Go to]

---

Suggested Reading

R. Ehrenberg. Bumblebees navigate turf without a map. Science News. Vol. 182, October 20, 2012, p. 17. Available online: [Go to]

S. Milius. Pigeon navigation finding called off-course. Science News. Vol. 181, May 19, 2012, p.8. Available online: [Go to]

S. Milius. Fifty-two things to do with a bat wing. Science News Online, January 7, 2009. [Go to]

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/349761/title/News_in_Brief_Bats_are_3-D_cartographers

man of steel man of steel illuminati illuminati Cnn Live Panda Express Google Fiber