AFP UK

Hurricane Grace grounded flights and forced tourists to spend the night in shelters on Mexico’s white sand Caribbean coastline as it tore through the Yucatan Peninsula before barreling farther north. 

Grace made landfall before dawn Thursday as a Category One hurricane — the lowest on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale — near the town of Tulum, famed for its Mayan temples.

After initially losing strength, Grace’s winds whipped back up to 70 miles per hour early Friday and it was expected to soon regain hurricane force and make a second landfall on Mexico’s Gulf coast, according to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC). 

“The system is expected to regain hurricane strength this morning,” the NHC said, issuing a hurricane warning for the coast of mainland Mexico from Puerto Veracruz to Cabo Rojo. 

“After landfall, Grace should weaken rapidly as it moves into the mountains of central Mexico.”

As of 0900 GMT, it was centered about 215 miles (345 kilometers) northeast of Veracruz, Mexico, and heading west toward more fishing villages and resort towns at a speed of 16 mph.

As the hurricane approached Mexico, more than 6,000 tourists and residents were evacuated to storm shelters across the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, according to local authorities.

The storm passed the Riviera Maya coastline without any loss of life, said Quintana Roo governor Carlos Joaquin. He said that water and electricity were being restored across the Caribbean state. 

The airport in resort hotspot Cancun had canceled over 100 flights Wednesday but resumed operations the following day even as ports remained closed, Joaquin said on Twitter.

Workers were seen clearing up fallen branches and other debris in Tulum but the town escaped major damage.

“The scare is over and luckily everything turned out OK,” said Sandra Rodriguez, a 39-year-old Argentinian tourist visiting Cancun.

Rodriguez admitted she had been worried because she was not used to such storms.

“I thought the hurricane was going to drown us,” she said.

– Blackouts, minor damage –

Electricity was cut off to almost 150,000 people, Joaquin said, but by late Thursday the Federal Electricity Commission said supply had been restored to 63 percent of affected users in Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatan.

Cancun’s hotel zone was largely deserted at dawn as intense wind and rain caused some damage to structures on the beach, which was pounded by strong waves.

In the neighboring state of Yucatan, the storm toppled trees in the city of Valladolid and damaged some of the less sturdy buildings, according to images released by local authorities.

After it crosses the Yucatan, the storm is expected to move over the southwestern Gulf of Mexico before hitting the state of Veracruz, where a hurricane warning was in effect.

“Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion,” the NHC said.

Heavy rainfall is likely to continue to buffet the area, with flash flooding and possible mudslides expected, the NHC said. 

The storm surge will be accompanied by “large and destructive waves” near the coast, it warned.

It added that “life-threatening surf and rip current conditions” could continue into the weekend.

Romania will soon conduct a census of its protected brown bears using DNA for the first time, with tensions raised between villagers fearing further attacks and conservationists warning against looser hunting laws.

Incidents with hungry bears descending into villages have sparked the ire of residents, in a country that has seen around 100 attacks over the last three years. 

A hunting ban loophole that allows the shooting of so-called nuisance bears is already being abused, say activists, who fear a rise in killings if the census finds the species is more numerous than thought. 

Sport hunting — which attracts amateurs from all over the world in search of a “trophy” — has been banned since 2016. 

But in a recent controversial case, environmentalists accuse a Liechtenstein prince of killing a brown bear, named Arthur, on a March hunt in the Carpathian Mountains — using a permit to shoot a female bear seen as a nuisance to residents.

Activists say the 17-year-old bear was the country’s largest, observed for years in the area.

Yet while the hunting ban loophole may be abused, residents are also fed up with rampant bear attacks — and want protection.

– ‘Villagers frightened’ –

Last month, a bear killed a shepherd and seriously injured another in the eastern part of the forested and mountainous Transylvania region.

“The situation has become untenable,” Marton-Csaba Bacs, mayor of Bixad village in central Romania, told AFP.

“Every day, bears ransack orchards and attack sheep. They even entered the courtyard of the clinic… The villagers are frightened.”

In neighbouring Harghita, Environment Minister Barna Tanczos’s home county, bears were seen on a train station platform and even in a restaurant kitchen, according to the police, who were called upon 12 times in a single weekend last month to keep them away. 

In this tense context, the results of the census may lead to a tug of war between environmentalists and the defenders of hunting. 

While activists welcome the census project, they fear it could lead to the hunting ban being lifted if authorities deem there are too many bears.

“Collecting samples and interpreting statistics in a transparent way is crucial,” Cristian Papp of the World Wildlife Fund told AFP.

– Analysing faeces –

Romania has long been known as having the largest population of brown bears in the EU, but just how many of the protected species actually roam the Carpathians remained unknown — until now.

In the coming months, 400 experts and volunteers will take samples of faeces and hair for DNA analysis, thanks to a EU fund of 11 million euros ($13 million), Tanczos told AFP.

Authorities say figures from the 1990s of more than 6,000 brown bears spread across some 30 percent of the country, especially in the Carpathians, are underestimated.

Whereas the methodology used so far — counting tracks in mud and snow — is unreliable, the collection of droppings and hair will make it possible to create a database of samples, each one duly stamped with a barcode, according to the minister.

The procedure can provide a wealth of information, including an animal’s sex and family ties, says Robin Rigg, president of the Slovak Wildlife Society, who has used the same methodology to count wolves. 

– ‘Massacre being prepared’ –

By casting a wide net, the number of samples “should be about three times bigger than the expected animal population,” said Djuro Huber, a professor at the University of Zagreb.

The census project also entails the creation of a bear sanctuary.

Last month, Bucharest adopted a decree giving local authorities the right to permit nuisance bear shootings, speeding up a laborious process that could take weeks. 

Now, in a matter of hours, aggressive bears could become a legal target — a move widely condemned by activists.

“A massacre is being prepared against these often starving animals, which are victims of logging, the destruction of their habitat and an attempt at demonisation by groups of hunters,” the Brigitte Bardot Foundation said in a letter to Romania’s president.

Tanczos has dismissed such accusations as “unfounded”, saying that the first option to deal with nuisance animals will always be their relocation, though he admits human-bear relations “have deteriorated”.

“If the state does not intervene, there’s a risk that desperate people will resort to illegal solutions to settle this conflict,” he said.

After dominating the electric vehicle market and throwing his hat into the billionaire space race, Tesla boss Elon Musk announced the latest frontier he’s aiming to conquer: humanoid robots.

The irascible entrepreneur said Thursday he would have an initial prototype of an androgynous “Tesla Bot” by next year. 

Based on the same technology as the company’s semi-autonomous vehicles, the robot will be able to perform basic repetitive tasks with the aim of eliminating the need for people to handle dangerous or boring work, Musk said at an online event on Tesla’s advances in artificial intelligence (AI).

“Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company because cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels,” he said. “It kind of makes sense to put that into a humanoid form.”

Tesla’s touting of its automation technology comes as the carmaker faces increased scrutiny over its driver-assistance system, with safety regulators in the United States launching a probe after a series of crashes. 

Tesla is accused of misleading motorists into believing the so-called Autopilot vehicles can drive themselves, though Musk has defended the system.

The Autopilot controversy was not discussed at Thursday’s two and a half hour online conference, or brought up during questions from the audience.

Instead, Musk pledged that his future robot would be a benign presence. 

He said the Tesla Bot, which will have five-fingered hands and come in black and white, is intended to be “friendly” and built such that “you can run away from it and most likely overpower it.”

“Hopefully that won’t happen, but you never know,” he joked.

Musk, the second richest person in the world according to Forbes, told the conference he believes robots will phase out physical labor for people. 

“I think essentially in the future physical work will be a choice,” he said. 

As CEO, Musk has transformed Tesla from a fledgling startup into a pacesetter in the electric car industry, with the company last month reporting its first-ever quarterly profit above $1 billion on record deliveries.

His company SpaceX is also competing in the booming commercial aerospace market, while Neuralink aims to develop brain implants to connect humans and computers. 

But the self-described “Technoking” has also repeatedly clashed with regulators over everything from his use of social media to discuss Tesla’s operations to local coronavirus health protocols affecting his factories. 

The company has had a rocky record with its human workforce, including allegations of unfair labor practices and firing a union organizer.

Chinese astronauts edged into space on Friday to add the finishing touches to a robotic arm on the Tiangong space station.

The foray, the second spacewalk in two months and relayed on state television, is part of China’s heavily promoted space programme which has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon.

In June, three crew arrived at the station, where they are set to remain in space for a total of three months in China’s longest crewed mission to date.

On Friday, astronauts Nie Haisheng and Liu Boming successfully exited the Tianhe core module to install foot stops and a workbench on the station’s robotic arm, said the China Manned Space Agency in a statement.

Video footage showed the astronauts working outside the spacecraft while tethered to it with a long rope.

Their tasks also include working on a thermal unit and adjusting a panoramic camera, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

This marks only the third spacewalk for Chinese astronauts, after the first in 2008 — when Zhai Zhigang made China the third country to complete a spacewalk after the Soviet Union and the United States.

The second took place in early July, when Liu and the third crew member Tang Hongbo left the station.

It is China’s first crewed mission in nearly five years and a matter of huge prestige as the country marks the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party.

Romania will soon conduct a census of its endangered brown bears using DNA for the first time, with tensions raised between villagers fearing further attacks and conservationists warning against looser hunting laws.

Incidents with hungry bears descending into villages have sparked the ire of residents, in a country that has seen around 100 attacks over the last three years. 

A hunting ban loophole that allows the shooting of so-called nuisance bears is already being abused, say activists, who fear a rise in killings if the census finds the protected species is not that endangered. 

Sport hunting — which attracts amateurs from all over the world in search of a “trophy” — has been banned since 2016. 

But in a recent controversial case, environmentalists accuse a Liechtenstein prince of killing a brown bear, named Arthur, on a March hunt in the Carpathian Mountains — using a permit to shoot a female bear seen as a nuisance to residents.

Activists say the 17-year-old bear was the country’s largest, observed for years in the area.

Yet while the hunting ban loophole may be abused, residents are also fed up with rampant bear attacks — and want protection.

– ‘Villagers frightened’ –

Last month, a bear killed a shepherd and seriously injured another in the eastern part of the forested and mountainous Transylvania region.

“The situation has become untenable,” Marton-Csaba Bacs, mayor of Bixad village in central Romania, told AFP.

“Every day, bears ransack orchards and attack sheep. They even entered the courtyard of the clinic… The villagers are frightened.”

In neighbouring Harghita, Environment Minister Barna Tanczos’s home county, bears were seen on a train station platform and even in a restaurant kitchen, according to the police, who were called upon 12 times in a single weekend last month to keep them away. 

In this tense context, the results of the census may lead to a tug of war between environmentalists and the defenders of hunting. 

While activists welcome the census project, they fear it could lead to the hunting ban being lifted if authorities deem there are too many bears.

“Collecting samples and interpreting statistics in a transparent way is crucial,” Cristian Papp of the World Wildlife Fund told AFP.

– Analysing faeces –

Romania has long been known as having the largest population of brown bears in the EU, but just how many of the endangered species actually roam the Carpathians remained unknown — until now.

In the coming months, 400 experts and volunteers will take samples of faeces and hair for DNA analysis, thanks to a EU fund of 11 million euros ($13 million), Tanczos told AFP.

Authorities say figures from the 1990s of more than 6,000 brown bears spread across some 30 percent of the country, especially in the Carpathians, are underestimated.

Whereas the methodology used so far — counting tracks in mud and snow — is unreliable, the collection of droppings and hair will make it possible to create a database of samples, each one duly stamped with a barcode, according to the minister.

The procedure can provide a wealth of information, including an animal’s sex and family ties, says Robin Rigg, president of the Slovak Wildlife Society, who has used the same methodology to count wolves. 

– ‘Massacre being prepared’ –

By casting a wide net, the number of samples “should be about three times bigger than the expected animal population,” said Djuro Huber, a professor at the University of Zagreb.

The census project also entails the creation of a bear sanctuary.

Last month, Bucharest adopted a decree giving local authorities the right to permit nuisance bear shootings, speeding up a laborious process that could take weeks. 

Now, in a matter of hours, aggressive bears could become a legal target — a move widely condemned by activists.

“A massacre is being prepared against these often starving animals, which are victims of logging, the destruction of their habitat and an attempt at demonisation by groups of hunters,” the Brigitte Bardot Foundation said in a letter to Romania’s president.

Tanczos has dismissed such accusations as “unfounded”, saying that the first option to deal with nuisance animals will always be their relocation, though he admits human-bear relations “have deteriorated”.

“If the state does not intervene, there’s a risk that desperate people will resort to illegal solutions to settle this conflict,” he said.

Romania will soon conduct a census of its endangered brown bears using DNA for the first time, with tensions raised between villagers fearing further attacks and conservationists warning against looser hunting laws.

Incidents with hungry bears descending into villages have sparked the ire of residents, in a country that has seen around 100 attacks over the last three years. 

A hunting ban loophole that allows the shooting of so-called nuisance bears is already being abused, say activists, who fear a rise in killings if the census finds the protected species is not that endangered. 

Sport hunting — which attracts amateurs from all over the world in search of a “trophy” — has been banned since 2016. 

But in a recent controversial case, environmentalists accuse a Liechtenstein prince of killing a brown bear, named Arthur, on a March hunt in the Carpathian Mountains — using a permit to shoot a female bear seen as a nuisance to residents.

Activists say the 17-year-old bear was the country’s largest, observed for years in the area.

Yet while the hunting ban loophole may be abused, residents are also fed up with rampant bear attacks — and want protection.

– ‘Villagers frightened’ –

Last month, a bear killed a shepherd and seriously injured another in the eastern part of the forested and mountainous Transylvania region.

“The situation has become untenable,” Marton-Csaba Bacs, mayor of Bixad village in central Romania, told AFP.

“Every day, bears ransack orchards and attack sheep. They even entered the courtyard of the clinic… The villagers are frightened.”

In neighbouring Harghita, Environment Minister Barna Tanczos’s home county, bears were seen on a train station platform and even in a restaurant kitchen, according to the police, who were called upon 12 times in a single weekend last month to keep them away. 

In this tense context, the results of the census may lead to a tug of war between environmentalists and the defenders of hunting. 

While activists welcome the census project, they fear it could lead to the hunting ban being lifted if authorities deem there are too many bears.

“Collecting samples and interpreting statistics in a transparent way is crucial,” Cristian Papp of the World Wildlife Fund told AFP.

– Analysing faeces –

Romania has long been known as having the largest population of brown bears in the EU, but just how many of the endangered species actually roam the Carpathians remained unknown — until now.

In the coming months, 400 experts and volunteers will take samples of faeces and hair for DNA analysis, thanks to a EU fund of 11 million euros ($13 million), Tanczos told AFP.

Authorities say figures from the 1990s of more than 6,000 brown bears spread across some 30 percent of the country, especially in the Carpathians, are underestimated.

Whereas the methodology used so far — counting tracks in mud and snow — is unreliable, the collection of droppings and hair will make it possible to create a database of samples, each one duly stamped with a barcode, according to the minister.

The procedure can provide a wealth of information, including an animal’s sex and family ties, says Robin Rigg, president of the Slovak Wildlife Society, who has used the same methodology to count wolves. 

– ‘Massacre being prepared’ –

By casting a wide net, the number of samples “should be about three times bigger than the expected animal population,” said Djuro Huber, a professor at the University of Zagreb.

The census project also entails the creation of a bear sanctuary.

Last month, Bucharest adopted a decree giving local authorities the right to permit nuisance bear shootings, speeding up a laborious process that could take weeks. 

Now, in a matter of hours, aggressive bears could become a legal target — a move widely condemned by activists.

“A massacre is being prepared against these often starving animals, which are victims of logging, the destruction of their habitat and an attempt at demonisation by groups of hunters,” the Brigitte Bardot Foundation said in a letter to Romania’s president.

Tanczos has dismissed such accusations as “unfounded”, saying that the first option to deal with nuisance animals will always be their relocation, though he admits human-bear relations “have deteriorated”.

“If the state does not intervene, there’s a risk that desperate people will resort to illegal solutions to settle this conflict,” he said.

Chinese astronauts edged into space on Friday to add the finishing touches to a robotic arm on the Tiangong space station.

The foray, the second spacewalk in two months and relayed on state television, is part of China’s heavily promoted space programme which has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon.

In June, three crew arrived at the station, where they are set to remain in space for a total of three months in China’s longest crewed mission to date.

On Friday, astronauts Nie Haisheng and Liu Boming successfully exited the Tianhe core module to install foot stops and a workbench on the station’s robotic arm, said the China Manned Space Agency in a statement.

Video footage showed the astronauts working outside the spacecraft while tethered to it with a long rope.

Their tasks also include working on a thermal unit and adjusting a panoramic camera, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

This marks only the third spacewalk for Chinese astronauts, after the first in 2008 — when Zhai Zhigang made China the third country to complete a spacewalk after the Soviet Union and the United States.

The second took place in early July, when Liu and the third crew member Tang Hongbo left the station.

It is China’s first crewed mission in nearly five years and a matter of huge prestige as the country marks the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party.

At a Tokyo cafe, Michio Imai greets a customer, but not in person. He’s hundreds of kilometres away, operating a robot waiter as part of an experiment in inclusive employment.

Dawn cafe’s robots are intended to be more than a gimmick, offering job opportunities to people who find it hard to work outside the home.

“Hello. How are you?” a sleek white robot shaped like a baby penguin calls from a counter near the entrance, turning its face to customers and waving its flippers.

Imai is behind the controls at his home in Hiroshima, 800 kilometres (500 miles) away, one of around 50 employees with physical and mental disabilities who work as Dawn’s “pilots”, operating robot staff.

The cafe opened in central Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district in June and employs staff across Japan and overseas, as well as some who work on site.

It was originally supposed to open last year to coincide with the Paralympics, but the opening was postponed by the pandemic — just like the Games, which begin on Tuesday.

Around 20 miniature robots with almond-shaped eyes sit on tables and in other parts of the cafe, which has no stairs and smooth wooden floors large enough for wheelchairs.

The machines named OriHime feature cameras, a microphone and a speaker to allow operators to communicate with customers remotely.

“May I take your order?” one asks, next to a tablet showing a menu of burgers, curry and salad.

As customers chat with the pilots operating the mini robots, three larger, humanoid versions move around to serve drinks or welcome customers at the entrance.

And there’s even a barista robot in a brown apron at the bar that can make coffee with a French press.

– ‘A part of society’ –

But the robots are largely a medium through which workers can communicate with customers.

“I talk to our customers about many subjects, including the weather, my hometown and my health condition,” said Imai, who has a somatic symptom disorder that makes leaving home difficult.

“As long as I’m alive, I want to give something back to the community by working. I feel happy if I can be a part of society.”

Other operators have a range of different abilities, including some Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patients who use eye movements on a special digital panel to send signals to the robots.

The project is the brainchild of Kentaro Yoshifuji, an entrepreneur who co-founded the company Ory Laboratory that makes the robots.

After suffering a bout of bad health as a child that left him unable to go school, he began thinking about ways to bring people into the workforce even if they can’t leave home.

“I’m thinking about how people can have job options when they want to work,” said the 33-year-old.

“This is a place where people can participate in society.”

He established the cafe with support from major companies and crowd-funding, and says the experiment is about more than robots.

“Customers here are not exactly coming to this location just to meet OriHime,” he told AFP at the cafe.

“There are people operating OriHime behind the scenes, and customers will come back to see them again.”

– Work to do on inclusion –

The cafe’s launch comes with the Paralympics due to open on August 24 and disability advocates debating Japan’s progress on inclusion and accessibility.

Since Tokyo won the bid to host the Games in 2013 it has touted efforts to make public facilities more accessible.

But support for inclusion remains limited, said Seiji Watanabe, head of a non-profit organisation in central Japan’s Aichi that supports employment for people with disabilities.

In March, the government revised regulations to edge up the minimum ratio of disabled workers at a company from 2.2 percent to 2.3 percent.

“The level is too low,” Watanabe told AFP. “And Japanese companies don’t have a culture of hiring diverse human resources on their own initiative.”

At Dawn, Mamoru Fukaya said he and his 17-year-old son were enjoying the cafe on a lunchtime visit.

“(The pilot) was very friendly,” the 59-year-old said. “Since he said he can’t work outside his home, it’s great that there’s this kind of chance.”

Yoshifuji is focused on the cafe project now, but thinks robots could one day even make the Paralympics more inclusive.

“There’s a possibility that a kind of new Paralympics for those who are bedridden can be created,” he said.

“We could even create new sports. That might be interesting.”

Human babies are not the only babblers, said a study published Thursday, some bats are also very talkative in their infancy and even make sounds that recall the googoo-gagas of our own tots.

Babbling in human children is key to developing the careful control over the vocal apparatus necessary for speech. 

The study published in the journal Science indicates the same is true for the greater sac-winged bat, or Saccopteryx bilineata, native to Central America.

“Human infants seem to babble on the one hand to interact with their caregivers, but they also do that when they’re completely alone, seemingly happily just exploring their voice, and that’s the same what our bats are doing,” study co-author Mirjam Knornschild, behavioral ecologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, told AFP.

Bats communicate by ultrasound, sound waves at frequencies above human hearing, but they can also make sounds audible to people.

“It sounds like a high pitched twittering to our ears… it’s melodic,” said Knornschild, who has worked with bats since 2003.

Saccopteryx bilineata don’t hide away in gloomy caves, but prefer to live in trees, making them easier to observe.  

The babbling of 20 baby bats was recorded in Costa Rica and Panama between 2015 and 2016 by researcher Ahana Fernandez, also affiliated with the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, who spent hours with the bats in the forest.

– Up to 43 minutes –

The mammals, like us, have a larynx, and start babbling about three weeks after birth, for about 7 to 10 weeks — until they are weaned.

During this period, the bats spend around 30 percent of their days babbling, with sessions lasting on average about seven minutes, the researchers calculated.

But one bat babbled for a full 43 minutes, a long stretch considering adult communication generally lasts but a few seconds. 

“That’s something really, really peculiar that the other bat species that have been studied to date simply don’t do,” said Knornschild.

“They’re very chatty.” 

The vocalizations were converted into images, called spectrograms. 

“Each syllable has a very specific shape, so to say, and they are easy to distinguish by eye,” Knornschild added. 

The researchers analyzed more than 55,000 produced syllables, finding universal characteristics of babbling in human infants in the bats, such as repetition, lack of meaning, but also that the sounds followed a certain rhythm. 

On top of that, like with humans, the learning curve is not linear.

Out of 25 syllables in the adult repertoire, young bats have not yet mastered all of them by the time they are weaned, suggesting that they continue to learn. 

– Song – 

The researchers were able to show that the young bats learned fairly early on a six-syllable song used by males to mark their territory and attract females.

“The pups listen to adult males singing and then imitate that song,” Knornschild said.

Baby females also learn the song, even though they won’t reproduce it as adults. But the study suggests learning it may help them judge the performance of their potential future partners.

Very few other species babble — only some birds, two species of marmosets and perhaps some dolphins or beluga whales.

Why would certain animals need to develop in this way and others not? 

“Navigating and communicating in a dark, 3d environment, seems to be a huge selective pressure for vocal learning,” Knornschild said.

But no matter the reason, the researchers underscore that developing a complex vocal system opens a world of possibilities — as demonstrated in humans, and now also in bats.

Human babies are not the only babblers, said a study published Thursday, some bats are also very talkative in their infancy and even make sounds that recall the googoo-gagas of our own tots.

Babbling in human children is key to developing the careful control over the vocal apparatus necessary for speech. 

The study published in the journal Science indicates the same is true for the greater sac-winged bat, or Saccopteryx bilineata, native to Central America.

“Human infants seem to babble on the one hand to interact with their caregivers, but they also do that when they’re completely alone, seemingly happily just exploring their voice, and that’s the same what our bats are doing,” study co-author Mirjam Knornschild, behavioral ecologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, told AFP.

Bats communicate by ultrasound, sound waves at frequencies above human hearing, but they can also make sounds audible to people.

“It sounds like a high pitched twittering to our ears… it’s melodic,” said Knornschild, who has worked with bats since 2003.

Saccopteryx bilineata don’t hide away in gloomy caves, but prefer to live in trees, making them easier to observe.  

The babbling of 20 baby bats was recorded in Costa Rica and Panama between 2015 and 2016 by researcher Ahana Fernandez, also affiliated with the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, who spent hours with the bats in the forest.

– Up to 43 minutes –

The mammals, like us, have a larynx, and start babbling about three weeks after birth, for about 7 to 10 weeks — until they are weaned.

During this period, the bats spend around 30 percent of their days babbling, with sessions lasting on average about seven minutes, the researchers calculated.

But one bat babbled for a full 43 minutes, a long stretch considering adult communication generally lasts but a few seconds. 

“That’s something really, really peculiar that the other bat species that have been studied to date simply don’t do,” said Knornschild.

“They’re very chatty.” 

The vocalizations were converted into images, called spectrograms. 

“Each syllable has a very specific shape, so to say, and they are easy to distinguish by eye,” Knornschild added. 

The researchers analyzed more than 55,000 produced syllables, finding universal characteristics of babbling in human infants in the bats, such as repetition, lack of meaning, but also that the sounds followed a certain rhythm. 

On top of that, like with humans, the learning curve is not linear.

Out of 25 syllables in the adult repertoire, young bats have not yet mastered all of them by the time they are weaned, suggesting that they continue to learn. 

– Song – 

The researchers were able to show that the young bats learned fairly early on a six-syllable song used by males to mark their territory and attract females.

“The pups listen to adult males singing and then imitate that song,” Knornschild said.

Baby females also learn the song, even though they won’t reproduce it as adults. But the study suggests learning it may help them judge the performance of their potential future partners.

Very few other species babble — only some birds, two species of marmosets and perhaps some dolphins or beluga whales.

Why would certain animals need to develop in this way and others not? 

“Navigating and communicating in a dark, 3d environment, seems to be a huge selective pressure for vocal learning,” Knornschild said.

But no matter the reason, the researchers underscore that developing a complex vocal system opens a world of possibilities — as demonstrated in humans, and now also in bats.