New analysis suggests communication among bats is learned and relatively sophisticated. Researchers at Tel Aviv University were able to tease out meaning from the loud and chaotic wall of sound emanating from a bat-filled cave.

"When you enter a bat cave, you hear a lot of 'gibberish,' a cacophony of aggressive bat noise -- but is this merely 'shouting' or is there information amid the noise?" Yossi Yovel, a professor of zoology, said in a news release. "Previous research presumed that most bat communication was based on screaming and shouting."

"We wanted to know how much information was actually conveyed -- and we wanted to see if we could, in fact, extract that information," Yovel said.

Scientists determined most spectral composition are emitted during confrontations. Analysis of the spectral composition of the calls helped scientists distinguish between calls related to food, sleeping positions or other resources.

"We found, in our research, that bat calls contain information about the identities of the caller and the addressee, which implies that there is a recognition factor," Yovel said. "We were also able to discern the purpose and the context of the conversation, as well as the possible outcome of the 'discussion.'"

What researchers had previously thought to be mostly uniform screaming turned out to be meaningful communication. Researchers hope their findings -- published in the journal Scientific Reports -- will inspire follow-up examinations and help shed light on the evolution of language.

"We have found that bats fight over sleeping positions, over mating, over food or just for the sake of fighting," Yovel said. "To our surprise, we were able to differentiate between all of these contexts in complete darkness, and we are confident bats themselves are able to identify even more information and with greater accuracy -- they are, after all, an extremely social species that live with the same neighbors for dozens of years."