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Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Current Events 5: Echolocation Forces Poor Bats to Nosedive Into Metal

Many people know that bats find bugs using echolocation. That's where they send out sound waves, and depending on which waves bounce back and where, they can tell the location of a bug. Now, new research says that bats also use echolocation to learn about their surrounding environment. Wild bats both young and old were placed in a room with smooth and textured wood and metal plates. All of the bats, both the young ones and the old ones, tried to drink from the smooth plates, but never the textured plates. They did this because when they found a smooth surface using echolocation, they thought it was water, and attempted to drink from it. Water (and smooth surfaces) have a smooth surface which sound waves bounce cleanly off of, while rougher or textured surfaces make sound waves bounce in more directions. Even the young bats that had never seen a large river or lake, would theoretically not know what a large smooth surface represents because they had never seen one, but they still tried to drink from the smooth surfaces. That means that the feature of recognizing smooth surfaces is engraved in all bat's brains, whether they had seen smooth surfaces before or not.
Here's a video that explains this topic really well, along with some cute footage of bats skimming the surfaces:



Sources:]
Sam Biddle
Nov. 2, 2010
http://gizmodo.com/5679971/echolocation-forces-poor-bats-to-nosedive-into-metal
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-11/video-reliance-echolocation-drives-bats-try-drink-metal-plates

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