{"id":154279,"date":"2025-09-13T16:42:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T16:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/154279\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T16:42:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T16:42:14","slug":"the-wrinkle-faced-bat-is-one-of-the-worlds-weirdest-with-a-flirting-technique-scientists-had-never-seen-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/154279\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wrinkle-Faced Bat Is One Of The World\u2019s Weirdest, With A Flirting Technique Scientists Had Never Seen Before"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Professor Bernal Rodr\u00edguez-Herrera at the University of Costa Rica received a phone call about some ugly bats in San Ramon, Costa Rica, he didn\u2019t think much of it. \u201cMost people think all bats are ugly, so I didn’t take the report very seriously at first,\u201d he said<\/a>. As it happened, what they had spotted were rarely observed \u201cmasked seducers\u201d: the wrinkle-faced bat.<\/p>\n

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As something of a bald ape myself, I don\u2019t like to call animals ugly, but it\u2019s hard to argue that it\u2019s not a fitting description for the wrinkle-faced bat<\/a> (Centurio senex). With the most convoluted faces of any bat, it can be hard to work out what\u2019s what when looking at them. Wrinkle-faced doesn\u2019t really capture just how wrinkly they are.<\/p>\n

However, that appearance is no accident. Oh no. Theirs is a wrinkled face born of millions of years of evolution that has molded them into juice-slurping specialists<\/a> with a very unique lifestyle, something Rodr\u00edguez-Herrera got to discover when he made the good decision to follow through with that report of \u201cugly bats\u201d and landed the jackpot.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen they sent photos, we realized that these animals were wrinkle-faced bats, Centurio senex, an incredible find,\u201d he said. \u201cNot only is this a rare bat species that a lot of bat researchers would love to have on their life lists, these bats were doing something that no one had ever seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A male wrinkle-faced bat with his mask up. AKA, sexy.<\/p>\n

It was a surprise in itself to find them in a cloud forest in San Ramon. What the authors of the 2020 study<\/a> saw when they tracked them down was that they were males, lots of them, all perching together on relatively low-hanging branches.<\/p>\n

You know when you\u2019re looking at a male wrinkle-faced bat because they pull out something that\u2019s apparently very sexy to the female of the species: a face mask made of skin. Oh yeah.<\/p>\n

When the researchers noticed that the males were all flocking together at around 6 pm and flapping off again at midnight, they realized that this was likely a kind of courting behavior \u2013 one that had never been reported before. Their rousing performances involved singing through the skin mask, and it\u2019s thought that by singing through the flap of flesh, they can alter the acoustic properties of their singing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The bats emit unique vocalizations consisting of only the fundamental frequency, without the harmonic overtones you get in other leaf-nosed bats. As well as identifying this unique way of flirting, the team also got to see what happens when it pays off, as they became the first to record two wrinkle-faced bats mating.<\/p>\n

“A female obviously could not resist the seductive calls of one of the masked singers any longer,” said Marco Tschapka, a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute from the University of Ulm, in a release<\/a>. “She joined the perching male and quickly they dedicated themselves to their private business, thus confirming our idea that the males were there to attract females.”<\/p>\n

So, just remember that the next time you think something, or someone, is ugly. Perhaps they\u2019re just perfect to the right partner.<\/p>\n

And if interesting bats are your thing, why not check out the bumblebee bat<\/a>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Professor Bernal Rodr\u00edguez-Herrera at the University of Costa Rica received a phone call about some ugly bats…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154280,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-154279","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}