40 Fun Facts About Echolocation

Which blind Marvel superhero from Hell's Kitchen perceives the world through an echolocation-like radar sense?

Daredevil was partly inspired by co-creator Bill Everett's daughter, who was legally blind and found that her hearing had become more finely attuned.

Which ocean liner's sinking led Lewis Fry Richardson to patent an underwater echo detector just a month later?

Titanic went down in April 1912, and the disaster pushed inventors to copy the way bats steer by echoes, work that grew into sonar.

Which deep-diving ocean giant makes echolocation clicks that are the loudest sound produced by any animal?

Sperm whale clicks bounce back and forth inside the enormous head, so researchers can measure an animal's sound-producing organ just by listening.

Which carnivorous species of Borneo's peat swamps has a sonar-reflecting back wall that guides bats inside to roost?

Pitcher plant species Nepenthes hemsleyana shelters woolly bats in its traps and in return takes about a third of its leaf nitrogen from their droppings.

The US Navy trains bottlenose dolphins to use their natural sonar to find which hidden underwater weapons?

Sea mines are hunted by the dolphins of the Navy Marine Mammal Program, which also trains California sea lions to recover lost equipment.

The greater bulldog bat of Latin America uses echolocation to detect ripples on the water made by which prey?

Fish are scooped up with a pouch between the bat's legs and gripped with sharp claws, a trick that earned the species the name fisherman bat.

Which island is home to the tenrecs, hedgehog-like and shrew-like mammals thought to use a simple form of echolocation?

Madagascar's tenrecs all descend from a single species that reached the island at least 25 million years ago, probably by rafting on floating vegetation.

Which lime-green North American insect has long twisting hindwing tails that confuse the echolocation of hunting bats?

Luna moth tails spin in the air and fool bats into striking the expendable streamers instead of the body more than half the time.

Which brain region lit up in blind expert echolocators only when recordings of their clicks included the echoes?

Visual cortex activity appeared only in the blind experts, while sighted volunteers hearing the same recordings could not perceive the objects at all.

Which bats mostly find their way by keen sight and smell instead of using echolocation?

Flying foxes are megabats, a family that includes the largest bats on Earth, with wingspans of up to 1.7 metres.

Which fatty organ in a dolphin's forehead works as an acoustic lens, focusing echolocation clicks into a beam?

Melon fat comes in layers of differing density that bend sound much as glass bends light, and every toothed whale has one.

Egyptian fruit bats, unlike most echolocating bats, make their sharp sonar clicks using which part of the body?

Tongue clicks come in pairs, slow and steady while the bat cruises but speeding up dramatically as it nears an object.

Which phenomenon, heard in the falling pitch of a passing siren, lets horseshoe bats sense an insect's beating wings?

Doppler effect shifts matter so much to horseshoe bats that they drop the pitch of their own calls to keep echoes at the frequency their ears hear best.

Which small flap of skin in front of a bat's ear canal helps it judge how high or low a target is?

Tragus flaps matter so much that bats with theirs temporarily glued out of place navigated only a quarter as well.

Porpoises are thought to use unusually high-pitched echolocation clicks to avoid being overheard by which predator?

Killer whale hearing stops at about 100 kHz, so small species that click above that pitch can hunt without advertising themselves.

Which ocean explorer suggested in the book The Silent World that porpoises navigate with something like sonar?

Jacques Cousteau guessed it after watching porpoises trail his research ship toward the Strait of Gibraltar, three years before scientists properly described the ability.

Which nocturnal fruit-eating bird of South American caves, known locally as the guácharo, navigates by echolocation?

Oilbird chicks are so fatty that people once boiled them down to make oil, and the adults' clicks are pitched where humans can hear them.

Toothed whales click by forcing air past nasal structures called phonic lips, also nicknamed after which animal?

Monkey lips work on recycled air shuttled between air sacs, so a toothed whale can keep clicking without taking a breath.

Which small cave-nesting birds, whose saliva nests go into bird's nest soup, navigate in darkness by echolocation?

Swiftlets make double clicks that fall well within human hearing, unlike the ultrasonic calls of most bats.

Which zoologist coined the word echolocation after proving with Robert Galambos that bats steer by sound?

Donald Griffin began the work as a Harvard undergraduate in 1938, and many physiologists of the day refused to believe his findings were possible.

Which predatory insect has a hearing organ on its thorax that picks up bat calls and triggers evasive action?

Mantis reactions are dramatic: as bat calls speed up, the insect abandons its course and spirals toward the ground, often after an aerial loop.

The fossil bat Onychonycteris suggests early bats had already mastered which ability before they evolved echolocation?

Flight seems to have come first: the 52-million-year-old fossil has well-developed wings but lacks the enlarged inner-ear cochlea of living sonar-using bats, though a 2010 re-examination left room for doubt.

Most echolocating bats produce their calls in which organ before sending them out through the open mouth?

Larynx muscles set the pitch of each call, and some bats shout at more than 140 decibels, a racket pitched too high for people to notice.

The inner-ear zone that horseshoe bats tune to their own echoes is named the acoustic what, after part of the eye?

Fovea is apt, since in the greater horseshoe bat a lengthened and thickened strip of the hearing membrane is devoted to echoes near 83 kHz.

Horseshoe bats, named for a leaf-like flap on the face, send their echolocation calls out through which body part?

Nostrils do the broadcasting in these bats, and the horseshoe-shaped nose-leaf that surrounds them aids echolocation and gives the family its name.

Which Arctic whale uses echolocation to find breathing holes in the ice and can reshape the bulge on its forehead?

Beluga foreheads are malleable and change shape as the animal makes sounds, and its high-pitched squeals and whistles earned it a nickname borrowed from the canary.

Dolphins of which murky Asian river have tiny eyes with no lens and rely on echolocation to navigate?

Ganges river dolphins are close cousins of those in the Indus, and the two groups are thought to have gone their separate ways about 550,000 years ago.

What name is given to the rapid run of up to 200 calls a second as a bat closes in on prey?

Terminal buzz calls get shorter as well as faster, which lets the bat fire them off rapidly without a call overlapping its own echo.

Bats and dolphins developed echolocation independently, a textbook example of which biological process?

Convergent evolution even reaches the molecular level here, because the hearing protein prestin shows matching changes in bats and dolphins.

Sonar, the human-made counterpart of echolocation, is short for sound navigation and which third word?

Ranging means measuring distance, which bats and submarines both do by timing how long an echo takes to come back.

Reginald Fessenden's underwater oscillator proved the value of echo detection by locating which object two miles away?

Iceberg detection worked, but the oscillator's long sound waves meant it could not tell which direction the echo had come from.

Through which part of the head do dolphins mainly receive returning echoes before fat channels pass them to the ear?

Lower jaw fat forms the main reception path, and some researchers think dolphins soften their own clicks near a target to shield themselves from loud echoes.

Which tiny insect-eating mammals use echolocation only to explore their habitat, not to pinpoint food as bats do?

Shrews burn energy at an unusually fast rate for small mammals, and some species even have a venomous bite.

Which Italian priest and biologist showed that bats with covered eyes could still dodge obstacles in the dark?

Lazzaro Spallanzani found in 1793 that bats flew just as well with their eyes covered, so some sense other than sight had to be guiding them, a puzzle that was not solved for almost 150 years.

Which insects, including the species Bertholdia trigona, fire rapid ultrasonic clicks that jam a hunting bat's sonar?

Tiger moths of that species can click up to 4,500 times a second, while most of their relatives click only to warn bats that they taste bad.

Which inventor of the first automatic machine gun proposed in 1912 that bats avoid obstacles using low-pitched sound?

Hiram Maxim had the right idea but the wrong pitch, since bat calls turned out to be far too high for human ears, not too low.

Which American philosopher used bat sonar to probe consciousness in the famous essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Thomas Nagel argued that imagining yourself hanging upside down and steering by sonar still cannot tell you what the world is like from a bat's own perspective.

Before experiments proved hearing was responsible, blind people's knack for sensing obstacles went by which name?

Facial vision got its name from the belief that nearby objects caused pressure changes a blind person could feel on the skin.

Which blind Californian, founder of World Access for the Blind, teaches a mouth-click technique called FlashSonar?

Daniel Kish lost both eyes to cancer before he was 13 months old, and his organisation has taught echolocation to at least 500 blind children.

Because the animal produces the sound itself, echolocation is classed as which type of sonar?

Active sonar in animals gets by with a single transmitter and just two receivers, the ears, set slightly apart.