Echolocation

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2018

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how some bats, dolphins and other animals emit sounds at high frequencies to explore their environments, rather than sight. This was such an unlikely possibility, to natural historians from C18th onwards, that discoveries were met with disbelief even into the C20th; it was assumed that bats found their way in the dark by touch. Not all bats use echolocation, but those that do have a range of frequencies for different purposes and techniques for preventing themselves becoming deafened by their own sounds. Some prey have evolved ways of detecting when bats are emitting high frequencies in their direction, and some fish have adapted to detect the sounds dolphins use to find them. With Kate Jones Professor of Ecology and Biodiversity at University College London Gareth Jones Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol And Dean Waters Lecturer in the Environment Department at the University of York Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:02.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:05.0	There's a reading list to go with it on our website.
0:07.0	And you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time.
0:12.0	I hope you enjoyed the programs.
0:14.0	Hello, if you could hear bats flying at night, they would definitely.
0:18.0	They make louder sounds and almost any animal,
0:21.0	equivalent to a pneumatic drill or jet engine.
0:23.0	But at higher frequencies, then we can detect, thankfully.
0:26.0	Many bats used echoes from the sounds they make to locate their prey and avoid obstacles in the dark.
0:32.0	Dolphins and tooth wells, they too do that.
0:35.0	And the techniques are being found in more and more animals.
0:39.0	It's so sensitive, it's been likened to hearing in colour.
0:42.0	Natural historians have had suspicions that bats were echo locating since the 18th century.
0:48.0	But it wasn't so far, but it was so far outside human experience that even into the 20th century,
0:53.0	anyone advancing the theory had to contend with ridicule from other scientists.
0:57.0	We'll meet you discuss echo location R, Kate Jones, Professor of Ecology and Biodeiversity at University College London.
1:05.0	Gareth Jones, Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol.
1:09.0	And Dean Waters, lecturer in the Environmental Department at the University of York.
1:14.0	Dean Waters, who first suggested that bats might have this skill?
1:18.0	Well, for that we have to go back to 1793 and an Italian priest, Lacero Spalanzani.
1:25.0	And Spalanzani, he had a pet owl, which sort of predates Harry Potter by some considerable margin.
	...

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