If bats ever used a cell phone, they could forgo the version with caller ID: The mammals can identify each other by their voices, a new study says.

Bats aren’t the only mammals to use voice recognition—people do it, too. Even in the days before caller ID, a simple “Hi, it’s me,” from a close friend or loved one was usually enough to figure out who’s on the other end. Recognizing a person by voice, however, requires previous knowledge: We can’t identify a stranger on the phone by voice alone because we have never met them before.

People can, however, discriminate between a familiar voice and an unfamiliar one, even if they’ve never met the other person. We can also distinguish between two individuals by voice alone even if we’ve never met them before.

Hanna Kastein and colleagues at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hannover, Germany, wanted to know whether bats could perform these same tasks.

“Bats are totally interesting mammals to study voice perception since they are dependent on their vocalizations for orientation and communication due to their nocturnal lifestyle. In addition, they are socially living animals that frequently communicate acoustically with other members of their species,” Kastein said. (Also see “‘Whispering’ Bat Evolved to Trick Prey.”)

WATCH: How Do Bats Land Upside Down?

Besides their social lifestyles, bats and people share a number of physical characteristics. Both produce sounds using a combination of the larynx, vocal cords, and nasal cavities. These structures work together with an animal’s physical makeup to produce an individual’s unique voice.

“In stressful situations, voices become higher pitched, or ‘squeaky,’ in bats as in humans. Also, each individual bat has a slightly different morphology, and thus its voice sounds different from any other individual, just as voices in humans differ individually,” Kastein said.

You Had Me at Hello

Kastein and colleagues wanted to know whether bats could use vocal calls to identify individuals with which they shared a roost, and whether they could use these same calls to distinguish between two different individuals.

The researchers worked with the greater false vampire bat (Megaderma lyra) because the species has a rich array of calls that it uses in several contexts. (See “Vampire Bats Have Vein Sensors.”)

The team observed two groups of bats kept in separate artificial roosts for two months. They hypothesized that bats that had the most body contact while roosting would form the closest relationships. Kastein and colleagues then recorded various vocal calls from both groups of bats.

When Kastein played the recording of a vocal call over a loudspeaker, bats in both roosts universally turned their heads toward the speaker regardless of whether the call was from a bat with which they had close body contact, a bat from the same roost, or a bat from the other roost. (Interactive: Hear tropical bat calls.)

Given that the artificial roosts had much lower rates of vocal calls, due to the lack of stimuli, the researchers thought that this response could be due to the novelty of hearing any type of vocalization.

Discriminating Bat

So the team did a second set of experiments in which they had a bat listen to the call of their “friend” until the call didn’t create any type of behavioral response, such as turning the head. This means the listening bat had become habituated to the call, according to the study, published recently in the journal Animal Cognition.

Then, the scientists alternated playing a vocalization of the bat friend with that of an unfamiliar bat. The listening bats were significantly more likely to turn their heads toward the call of their friend—indicating both that they recognized their friend and that they could distinguish between individual vocalizations. (Also see “‘Talking’ Whale Could Imitate Human Voice.”)

“In our study, we found that the … false vampire bat is able to discriminate between different voices, including both known or unknown individuals,” Kastein noted.