Echolocating bats use future-target information for optimal foraging

Significance This study shows how an animal dynamically and rationally controls its sensing and navigates to capture multiple prey items. To perform this study, we extracted sonar attention and flight attention of foraging wild bats from both empirical data and mathematical modeling. We show that the bats directed their sonar and flight attention toward not only an immediate prey but also the next prey. In addition, numerical simulation shows a possibility that the bats select suitable flight paths for the consecutive capture. Hence, wild echolocating bats plan their flight paths by distributing their attention among multiple prey items, which means that the bats do not forage in a hit-or-miss fashion but rather spatially anticipate their future targets for optimum routing.