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Despite their nocturnal habits, bats occupy virtually all terrestrial niches on Earth. Yet the molecular adaptations underlying this ecological diversity remain underexplored. Working with an international team for the better part of a decade, we have used amplicons, transcriptomes, hybrid probes, and more recently genomes to relate foraging and feeding ecology to sensory genes and pathways. We have found numerous, parallel instances of pseudogenization in vision and chemosensory genes, matching diversity of diet and olfactory receptors, the conservation of functional vomeronasal receptors since the K-T boundary in some lineages, and rampant preadaptation to divergent diets in sensory pathways. Our findings have upended the model of adaptation in response to ecological opportunities in the form of new diets, suggesting instead that shifts in foraging underlie much of the diversity we see today.

Image credit: Rossiter Lab