Latest Human echolocation Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The demands of living at sea require constant vigilance, including when these animals’ circadian rhythms dictate the need for sleep. Dolphins meet these 24-hour security requirements by sleeping with one half of their brain while surfacing to breath and avoiding predators with the other half, according to new research published this week in PLoS ONE. A group of San Diego researchers has shown that these marine mammals have evolved...

In the dark world of the underwater ocean, whales need to locate their prey accurately and quickly. In low-vision conditions whales use echolocation to find fish swimming nearby, and now it has been discovered that they can focus their acoustical “vision” to accurately located slightly differing objects. For this study, Laura Kloepper from the University of Hawaii and her her PhD supervisor, Paul Nachtigall, utilized the help of Kina the False Killer Whale, a species related to...

False killer whales focus echolocation clicks Hunting in the ocean's murky depths, vision is of little use, so toothed whales and dolphins (odontocetes) rely on echolocation to locate tasty morsels with incredible precision. Laura Kloepper from the University of Hawaii, USA, explains that odontocetes produce their distinctive echolocation clicks in nasal structures in the forehead and broadcast them through a fat-filled acoustic lens, called the melon. 'Studies by other people showed...

New research reveals a right-hemispheric bias in bats when it comes to tackling navigation and a left-hemispheric advantage for communication Imagine listening to music while carrying on a conversation with friends. This type of multi-tasking is fairly easy to do, right? That's because our brains efficiently and effectively separate the auditory signals – music to the right side; conversation to the left. But what researchers have not been able to do in humans or animals is to see a...

By placing real and virtual objects in the flight paths of bats, scientists at the Universities of Bristol and Munich have shed new light on how echolocation works. Their research is published today in Behavioral Processes. The researchers found that it is not the intensity of the echoes that tells the bats the size of an object but the 'sonar aperture', that is the spread of angles from which echoes impinge on their ears. Echolocating bats emit calls for orientation. These calls bounce...

TAU researchers look to animal "return signals" to shape medical and military advances Sonar and ultrasound, which use sound as a navigational device and to paint accurate pictures of an environment, are the basis of countless technologies, including medical ultrasound machines and submarine navigation systems. But when it comes to more accurate sonar and ultrasound, animals' "biosonar" capabilities still have the human race beat. But not for long. In a new project that studies bats,...

Caroline DeLong, an assistant professor of psychology at Rochester Institute of Technology, is researching object discrimination in goldfish and echolocation in dolphins to bring scientists closer to unlocking the mysteries of animal perception and cognition. (PRWEB) October 25, 2011 The fictitious storybook character Dr. Doolittle was known for talking with animals. Caroline DeLong, an assistant professor of psychology at Rochester Institute of Technology, is a real-life Doolittle whose...

Bats derive their ability to use echolocation, the bouncing of sound waves off objects to produce an accurate representation of the environment in total darkness, from so-called “superfast” muscles, researchers reported in latest issue of the journal Science. These superfast muscles, which are located in the bats’ larynx, are a physical trait never before seen in mammals, and allow the bate to make a rapid series of calls as they home in on their prey.   They are the fastest...

A new study reveals that the way fruit bats use biosonar to 'see' their surroundings is significantly more advanced than first thought. The study, published September 13 in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology, examines Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus), which use echolocation to orient inside their caves and to find fruit hidden in the branches of trees. Their high-frequency clicks form a sonar beam that spreads across a fan-shaped area, and the returning echoes allow them...

The researchers discovered that a rainforest vine, pollinated by bats, has evolved dish-shaped leaves with such conspicuous echoes that nectar-feeding bats can find its flowers twice as fast by echolocation. The study is published today in Science.While it is well known that the bright colours of flowers serve to attract visually-guided pollinators such as bees and birds, little research has been done to see whether plants which rely on echolocating bats for pollination and seed dispersal...