Encyclopedia > Animal echolocation

  Article Content

Animal echolocation

Animal Echolocation

Some animals use sound waves to locate objects including obstacles and prey. This sense is known as echolocation, and is used by the bat, dolphin and some whales.

Besides emitting ultrasonic pulses, bats employ two kinds of saccades.

  • Position (mechanical translation) saccades: moving the body, the head, or the ear flaps from side to side
  • Frequency saccades: varying the frequency depending on ambient conditions
Both kinds of saccades result in improvement of the spatial information (distance and location) and resolution.

For a comprehensive description of the echolation used by bats see microbat.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Northampton, Suffolk County, New York

... age is 34 years. For every 100 females there are 91.0 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there are 82.9 males. The median income for a household in the town ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 25.3 ms