Dylan Gomes

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Boise State University

Papers

Total Citations

174

H-Index

About

Dylan Gomes is a sensory ecologist whose research sits at the intersection of animal behavior, bioacoustics, and conservation biology. His work focuses primarily on how animals perceive and respond to acoustic environments, with particular emphasis on bats, birds, and the ecological consequences of noise—both anthropogenic and natural. Gomes's most influential contribution, "Bats perceptually weight prey cues across sensory systems when hunting in noise" (2016, 117 citations), demonstrated that predatory bats actively adjust their reliance on multiple sensory inputs when background noise degrades one channel—a finding with significant implications for understanding how human-generated noise disrupts wildlife survival and reproduction. This work helped establish the concept of perceptual weighting as a key adaptive strategy under noisy conditions. Building on this foundation, his 2021 study on "phantom rivers" (38 citations) revealed that intense natural soundscapes can themselves shape animal distributions, effectively filtering bird and bat communities by acoustic niche. This challenged ecologists to consider natural sensory environments as underappreciated drivers of community structure. His additional work probing multimodal weighting in the context of sexually selected traits (2017) further illustrates his commitment to linking sensory ecology with evolutionary theory—making Gomes a distinctive voice in understanding how sound shapes life across multiple biological scales.