Adaptation of Specialized Auditory System to Echolocation in CF-FM Bat

The evolution makes bats have abilities of flying, echolocating and highly adaptating to living surroundings. Bats, as the only true flying mammals, belong to the Chiroptera, ranking the second order of the mammals with more than 1000 species. They are classified into Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera according to their size and morphological characteristics of the body. Because bats share some basic principles with human in auditory perception, the researches of bats can provide helpful information to understand the hearing of human. The echolocation signals emitted by bats are regular and can be easily imitated to study the mechanism of the signal processing in the central auditory system, especially in the processing of complex acoustic signals, bats is an excellent model animal. Moreover, the biosonar system of echolocation bats with very high temporal and spatial resolution has very important value in bionics, which is a very interesting topic. The study on auditory structure and function of CF-FM (constant frequency-frequency modulation) bats has gone through a considerable time and achieved numerous new understanding, some adaptive mechanisms of the acute auditory system to echolocation behavior are also revealed. Therefore, the research progress in relation to the auditory system and echolocation of CF-FM bats are briefly introduced and reviewed in this article.