{"id":276100,"date":"2026-02-05T21:24:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T21:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/276100\/"},"modified":"2026-02-05T21:24:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T21:24:14","slug":"for-israels-foremost-chiropterologist-every-bat-is-a-mitzvah-the-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/276100\/","title":{"rendered":"For Israel\u2019s foremost chiropterologist, every bat is a mitzvah \u2013 The Forward"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Professor<\/p>\n

Professor Yovel, in his element Photo by Ofri Eitan<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Noah<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\tBy Noah Hirsch-Rechter<\/a>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tFebruary 5, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Bats get bad press. Short-sighted and cave-dwelling, they generally make the news only when carrying disease, transfiguring into vampires, or else lending their name to paranoiac military commanders (e.g. Colonel \u2018Bat\u2019 Guano<\/a>, in Dr. Strangelove).\u00a0<\/p>\n

All of which is grossly unfair \u2014\u00a0at least according to Yossi Yovel, a professor of zoology at Tel Aviv University, and author of The Genius Bat, recently named a \u2018Book of the Year\u2019 by the science journal Nature.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cUsually, bats are very nice,\u201d said Yovel.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the flying mammals have been remarkably tolerant towards Yovel and his small team of researchers, who\u2019ve studied bat echolocation for the better part of a decade, and have proved that bats are smarter creatures than previously thought. And only rarely, Yovel said, has he gotten bitten. \u201cBut you can\u2019t blame them,\u201d he added. \u201cBecause you\u2019re holding them in your hand, and you\u2019re a big creature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yovel first encountered the study of bats, or chiropterology, as an undergraduate at Tel Aviv University, where he took a course on bat echolocation, the first ever held in Israel. He was immediately hooked. \u201cSuddenly, I discovered this new world! Of using sound for vision, basically,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Sensory zoology, as the broader research field is known, meant Yovel could combine two of his abiding interests: animals and physics. The ways in which animals used sound to get around provoked mathematical questions, not just biological ones.<\/p>\n

When Yovel started his research in the late 2000s, he was the first Israeli zoologist to focus explicitly on bats\u2019 sensory behavior. Previously, researchers had only explored bat physiology: how they maintained heat, how they hibernated, what they ate, and so forth. Yovel, by contrast, was \u201call about sound.\u201d<\/p>\n

His most important contribution to the field to date, one described in detail in The Genius Bat, is using GPS devices to track bats and show that they are, in fact, thinking, feeling creatures.<\/p>\n

To create the gadgets, Yovel approached an Israeli startup that specialized in manufacturing minuscule GPS instruments \u2014 the company had initially designed them in the early aughts, intending to put them inside cameras \u2014\u00a0with an unusual request: Could they make one that Yovel could stick, using biological glue,<\/a> to bats?<\/p>\n

\"AA bat refuels Photo by Omer Yinon<\/p>\n

\u201cSo they developed it for me,\u201d Yovel said. \u201cAnd though the main thing is the GPS, there\u2019s also a microphone in there. And that combination is what\u2019s so unique, because we wanted to record sound echolocation as the bats are flying.\u201d<\/p>\n

The research can be hands-on (Yovel attaches the trackers himself) and not without its challenges \u2014 chief among them retrieving the devices, which by design fall off the bats within a few days.<\/p>\n

Yovel and his team wear antennae, which pick up signals from a \u201csmall pinger\u201d attached to the GPS, but still can spend hours searching.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a huge bottleneck that people are not aware of,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like a treasure hunt, and often we climb mountains or have to go through thick vegetation.\u201d<\/p>\n

To tackle this problem, Yovel and his team constructed a lab \u2014 \u201cour own bat colony,\u201d he calls it \u2014 at Tel Aviv University, where dozens of bats roost. But the bats are allowed to roam free, so they \u201cgo out and come back,\u201d Yovel said.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the facility, Yovel can track bats for months, even years, though they haven\u2019t exactly gone undetected. \u201cSometimes, people complain to me about bats pooping on their cars and on their houses,\u201d he said. \u201cI say to them, \u2018tell me where you live, and I can check if our bat visited your backyard or not!\u201d<\/p>\n

By studying the bats\u2019 sonar activity, Yovel and his team have shown that bats possess what he describes as a \u201ccognitive map in their brain.\u201d They\u2019ve demonstrated, for instance, that bats can map time, avoiding objects \u2014\u00a0a tree, say \u2014 that they\u2019ve previously visited. \u201cThey know that a long time has passed,\u201d said Yovel, \u201cand so they will not return to this tree, because they assume that there\u2019s no more fruit on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bats even respond to illness in a fairly recognizable manner, often deciding simply to stay at home. \u201cSick bats will usually avoid any contact, and will not fly out, just like we prefer to be in bed when we\u2019re sick,\u201d Yovel said.<\/p>\n

Whether this rises to the level of full-on consciousness is a matter of some debate, though Yovel believes that bats \u2014 indeed, most animals \u2014 have at least some degree of consciousness. The challenge, then, is finding \u201csophisticated ways to probe these degrees.\u201d After all, how do you measure such a thing without language as a guide?<\/p>\n

He reaches for an unusual comparison to emphasize the dilemma: toddlers. \u201cPre-lingual toddlers are obviously conscious, right? But we need to find ways to examine this using behavioral experiments, because we can\u2019t ask them,\u201d he said. Artificial Intelligence will certainly play an important role. \u201cThat\u2019s the future,\u201d Yovel said. \u201cUsing AI models to simulate bat behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Yovel will continue to use bats to explore what he calls the \u201cconsciousness-gap\u201d between humans and animals. \u201cOr,\u201d he added, grinning a little, \u201cthe lack of a gap.\u201d<\/p>\n

Noah Hirsch-Rechter is a Forward intern. He recently completed a master\u2019s in journalism at City St George\u2019s, University of London and previously worked as an Education Associate at Harvard Hillel, where he organized educational trips, taught seminars to undergraduates on a range of Jewish subjects, oversaw Hillel\u2019s social media, and ran its social justice and equity programming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Professor Yovel, in his element Photo by Ofri Eitan By Noah Hirsch-Rechter February 5, 2026 Bats get bad…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":276101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-276100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}