Bats use echolocation to be able to communicate with other bats, but they aren't just the one using this kind of technique. Plants in Borneo jungle, called Nepenthes hemsleyana, use this kind of communication too, and surprisingly they use this to attract bats as well. The Nepenthes hemsleyana is a flesh-eating plant, but some say these plants are terrible at eating flesh.

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According to National Geographic, these plants are meant to be insect traps, but because of their very big pitchers that are short of fluid and their lack of insect attractants, they are terrible at catching their meals.

Ulmar Grafe, from the University of Brunei Darussalam, studied the inside of N. hemsleyana and he saw fewer than few insects than other pitchers have. However, he was surprised to find small bats inside these plants.

When Grafe asked for the help of a wife-and-husband team, Caroline and Michael Schoner from the University of Greifswald, they found the same species of bats, known as Hardwicke's woolly, roosting inside the plants, National Geographic reported.

The plants, which have roomier pitchers than average, give bats comfort and a place to stay, in return the bats repay them with their feces. The bats' feces are rich in nitrogen, which as per researchers, provide the pitchers with a third of their supply. This is said to be the reason why carnivorous plants changed and abandoned its insect-killing ways and became a bat landlord for a living.

To find out how bats were able to use the plant as its roosting place, Michael Schoner and the team used a sonar device to identify if the pitcher's shape serves as an effective "acoustic reflector." They placed it at different angles away from N. hemsleyana and its closest relative Nepenthes rafflesiana, which doesn't host bats. Then they measured the ability of both plants to return the echolocation sound to its source. They found out that the N. hemsleyana was able to produce a very loud reflector echo that was specific to that plant species only, The Verge has learned.

According to Discovery News, the behavioral experiments showed that the bats respond to those sounds echoed back to them from the plants. These bats are better at finding some partially hidden pitcher plants when their reflectors are intact than when the reflector had been reduced. The bats also choose this kind of pitcher plants more as one of the best places to roost because their reflector had not been reduced.

Schoner said that the carnivorous plants in general already solved the problem of nutrient deficiency; he was astonished by the N. hemsleyana's case taking a new turn. Maybe the N. hemsleyana reduced its ability to attract some insects, but it does adapt to its new trait that attract other species without them being digested, as per Discovery News.

TagsCarnivorous Plants, bats, communication, discovery, Science, Echolocation