Human echolocation - 'seeing' like a bat

An intersting podcast/article on human echolocation and 'What is it like to be a bat' was published in Nature News recently (here). 

"

What is it like to be a bat?

Bat ecologists have made it their life’s work to find out, philosophers argue we may never understand, and one blind woman knows better than anyone. In the first episode of Audiofile, Nature’s new sound science series, find out how much we can really know about what it’s like to be a bat, and what it tell us about the limits of human perception.

• Thomas Nagel: What is it like to be a bat?
• David Papineau, KCL
• Simmons lab, Brown University
• Lore Thaler, Durham University

"

 

This is the first podcast from the new Audiofile - and is quite nice.  I except if you check back there will soon be more podcasts relating to sound (here).

Whale communication

Whale communication is known to be diverse and eleaborate and at the Smithsonian they have found: diet, hearing and bones (inner ear and jaw) all lead to whales communicating as they do.

Check out this intersting video from BBC today:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32123131

When foraging gets rough - bats jam each others echolocation calls

A new study on Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasilensis) published this month reveals that bats are not always kind to each other when it comes to foraging behaviors.  These bats that use echolocation to forage for food are deploying strategies to prevent other individuals from successfully finding food.  How these bats are doing this has been compared to the jamming technology of a military aircraft. 

Not always nice - individual Mexican free-tailed bat may impede others of the same species from being able to find food using echolocation by 'jamming' their echolocation calls.

The interference that these bats create is called jamming and researchers Aaron Corocoran and William Conner from Wake Forest University have found that individuals will jam the call of others during competition for their nightly hunt for food (namely insects).

Read more (here).