Donald Griffin, Robert Galambos
acoustics
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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.
Assuming that one’s senses shape one’s experience, a bat with both eyes and echolocation, a goat with its rectangular pupils, a spider with its eight eyes, a butterfly with its compound eyes, and a scallop with a hundred little bright blue eyes experience the world differently than the way we do. Further, different combinations of sensory inputs matter. A spider’s eyesight is not very acute, but it can rely on touch, vibration, and taste as well as on its vision.
See also in The book of science:
Readings on wikipedia: