Echolocation: How Do Animals Like Bats Use This Hunting Technique For Survival by Predicting Prey Movement?

Echolocation is well-known as a primary mode of prey hunting for numerous animal species. But according to a delegation by the Acoustical Society of America, animals also use the same evolutionary tool to predict their prey's movement increasing their success rate in the hunt.

What is Echolocation?

Echolocation, according to DiscoverWildlife, is a technique used by numerous animals to determine the location of objects using sound. It allows animals to move in extreme darkness and navigate, hunt, and through obstacles.

Numerous animals use echolocation for their survival. Bats perhaps are the most well-known. However, whales, dolphins, nocturnal birds like swiftlets, shrews, and tenrecs from Madagascar rely on echolocation. The distinct technique for dolphins and other toothed whales enables them to see clearly in dark ocean depths and muddy waters and may have evolved due to the need to chase squids and other deep-sea diving species. Bats, on the other hand, use echolocation to fly at night and in dark caves. The skill may have arisen due to the need to locate nocturnal flying insects that birds cannot hunt.

Marine mammals use echolocation by reflecting high-pitched clicking sounds off various underwater objects. The sounds are made via squeezed air passed through the animal's nasal passages near its blowholes. Soundwaves then pass into its forehead, where a blob of fat known as the melon focuses the vibration into a beam.

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Prey Predictions Using Echolocation in Bats

The Acoustical Society of America's 181st meeting will be held from November 29 to December 3 at Hyatt Regency Seattle, Seattle, Washington.

Angeles Salles, a representative from Johns Hopkins University, is set to discuss how bats rely on echolocation and auditory information of their own civilizations to hunt airborne insects. The "Bats use Predictive Strategies to Track Moving Auditory Objects" session is set for November 30.

In contrast to many predators that primarily rely on vision, bats create discrete echos that create snapshots that allow bats to see a representation of their environment. They produce sounds via echolocation through contraction of the larynx or clicking their tongues before analyzing the representation of returning echoes.

The said echo snapshots provide bats with interrupted sensory information regarding their target's trajectory to build an accurate prediction model of the bat's prey location. The process enables bats to track and intercept their prey during the hunt.

Salles explains to Phys.Org that it is an innate capability similar to how humans can predict where a ball will land once tossed. When a bat locates its target,, it uses acoustic information to calculate its prey's speed and anticipates where it will be next.

Bat calls are often ultrasonic. Hence, human hearing cannot always recognize the noise. Echolocating bats integrate the acoustic snapshots over a period of time, with larger prey producing even stronger echoes to predict its movement in uncertain conditions. However, Salles notes that the amount of error in the bat's predictions increases when it comes to erratic flight maneuvering prey and cluttered environments.

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