Bat echolocation Escalation Bats do it Commentary

Donald Griffin, Robert Galambos acoustics

Bat echolocation

Lazzaro Spallanzani showed that bats can navigate in the dark. Charles Jurine showed that they use their heads and respond to sounds that we cannot hear. Finally, Griffin and Galambos showed that bats emit ultrasound and that they map their surroundings by listening to the echos.

Escalation

A bat constructs a mental 3-D map giving the location and path of a tiger moth in the night sky. The tiger moth produces a series of ultrasonic clicks specifically to jam the bat’s ability to locate it.

Bats do it

Bats do it; birds do it; and most people can’t do it. Eagles see their prey from high in the sky. Pigeons feel magnetic direction as they fly. Dogs hear higher frequencies. Mantis shrimp have sixteen color reception cones, where we have only three. Snakes see in the dark with infrared vision. Bears smell their meals from eighteen miles away. Sharks see electric fields that living things create. Yet we feel somehow superior, somehow bigger stronger smarter more able and somewhat more knowing, I don’t know why.