Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, the greater horseshoe bat, has one of the largest geographic distributions of any bat, ranging from Europe and northern Africa in the east to China, Korea, and Japan in the west. This subspecies, R. f. nippon, is from Japan. Like other members of the genus Rhinolophus, these bats specialize in hunting insects in complex habitats (in and near vegetation). They have an unusual, highly specialized echolocation system that takes advantage of the Doppler shift to separate emitted pulses (calls) and returning echoes in frequency rather than in time. These bats simultaneously emit long, constant frequency calls and listen to returning echoes, and analyze the resulting auditory data to build a complex, dynamic auditory map of their environment. An anatomical feature associated with use of Doppler shift echolocation is an extremely large cochlea, in which the basal turn is tuned to be especially sensitive to the frequency of returning echoes, which are lower frequency than the calls emitted by the bat.