Whenever bats use echolocation when foraging for food or to communicate with other bats: sounds are omnipresent. How Seba’s short-tailed bat, a species native to South America, filters out important signals from the wide diversity of ambient sound is being examined by researchers at the Institute of Cell Biology and Neuroscience at Goethe University Frankfurt. The most recent finding: the brain stem, which to date had been regarded as being solely responsible for very basic tasks, already processes the probabilities of acoustic signals.