Figure 3.

Bats maintained a fixed approach phase during flight. (A) When flying to a closer target (blue or black circles) the bats started their approach ‘in step’, meaning that signal duration at takeoff was appropriate as if the bat reached this distance at flight from a greater distance. Data are aligned to landing (distance ‘0’), shown are mean ± se, smoothed over a three-window period. A-1 All individuals, normalized data. A-2 An example of one individual. (B) The same strategy was evident with regards to emission rate and buzz initiation distance (vertical lines in panels B1-2, colours encoding is the same as the circles) – intervals between signals at the beginning of flight for a closer target were ‘in step’ as if the bat reached that distance from a farther starting point. Buzz was initiated at a fixed distance from target regardless of total flight distance. B-1 shows normalized data of all bats (normalization is the same as in Fig. A), B-2 is an example of one individual. See also Supplementary Figs S3 and S5.