Echolocation: what goes around comes around

Subject : Environment

Section: species in news

Context:

Bats, dolphins and submarines all use the same technique to get a sense of their surroundings: Echolocation.

What is echolocation?

Nature’s own sonar system, echolocation, occurs when an animal or an object emits a sound wave that bounces off an object, returning an echo that provides information about the object’s distance and size.

Which species can echolocate?

Over a thousand species echolocate, including most bats, all toothed whales, and small mammals.
Many are nocturnal, burrowing, and ocean-dwelling animals that rely on echolocation to find food in an environment with little to no light.
Animals have several methods for echolocation, from vibrating their throats to flapping their wings.
Nocturnal oilbirds and some swiftlets, some of which hunt in dark cave environments, produce short clicks with their syrinx, the vocal organ of birds.
Some people can also echolocate by clicking their tongues, a behavior shared by only a few other animals, including tenrecs, a shrew-like animal from Madagascar, and the Vietnamese pygmy dormouse, which is effectively blind.

Defense against echolocation:

Some moths have evolved their own defenses against echolocating bats. The tiger moth flexes the tymbal organ on either side of its thorax to produce clicks, which jams bat sonar and keeps the predators at bay.

Applications of Echolocation technique:

Humans have harnessed the principles of this ingenious technique to create devices like sonar and Radar.
SONAR is an acronym of ‘Sound navigation and ranging’.
- It is widely used for underwater navigation, communications, and to find fish.
RADAR: an acronym for ‘Radio detection and ranging’.
- It is used in aviation, weather forecasting, and military applications to detect and track objects by bouncing radio waves off them.
More recently engineer’s have used echolocation to develop smartphone apps that can create a map of a room to help people with visual impairments navigate their environs better.