Echolocation

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2018

⏱️ 52 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how some bats, dolphins and other animals emit sounds at high frequencies to explore their environments, rather than sight. This was such an unlikely possibility, to natural historians from C18th onwards, that discoveries were met with disbelief even into the C20th; it was assumed that bats found their way in the dark by touch. Not all bats use echolocation, but those that do have a range of frequencies for different purposes and techniques for preventing themselves becoming deafened by their own sounds. Some prey have evolved ways of detecting when bats are emitting high frequencies in their direction, and some fish have adapted to detect the sounds dolphins use to find them. With Kate Jones Professor of Ecology and Biodiversity at University College London Gareth Jones Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol And Dean Waters Lecturer in the Environment Department at the University of York Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:45.0	Hello if you could hear bats flying at night they were deafen us.
0:49.0	They make louder sounds on almost any animal, equivalent to a pneumatic drill or jet engine,
0:54.7	but at higher frequencies than we can detect, thankfully.
0:58.0	Many bats use echoes from the sounds they make to locate their prey and avoid obstacles in the dark.
1:04.0	Dolphins and tooth whales, they too do that and the techniques are being found in more and more animals.
1:10.0	It's so sensitive it's been likened to hearing in color.
1:14.0	Natural historians have had suspicions that bats were
1:17.0	eco-locating since the 18th century,
1:20.0	but it was so far outside human experience that even into the
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