Science News for Kids, May 9th, 2007
It takes weeks, treats, and a lot of patience to train a bat to fly inside a wind tunnel. Bats already know how to fly, of course. The problem is to get them to do it inside a small tunnel with the wind rushing at them.
So scientists at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, use rewards to coax the animals. If the bats land on the floor or walls of the wind tunnel and refuse to fly, the scientists move them to an enclosure without food. But "if they fly for a minute without crashing, we feed them," says Sharon Swartz, a biologist at Brown.
The bats soon learn that to get a treat, th...
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