Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Bomb and this this is a classic episode from our archives, and this one we talk about how echolocation works and what animals do it best. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bomb. Here, take a second to think about a nar wall. It's a whale with a unicorn horn of fairytale animal right, so it may come as no surprise that this improbable animal of the North Seas has actual superpowers. The nar walls spiral horn
isn't just decorative. It's actually a modified tooth that can grow to lengths of up to nine feet that's about three meters. These tusks contain around ten million nerve endings. Some nar walls have two tusks, while others have none, and they use them for a variety of purposes, like
testing the chemical concentrations in seawater. The males use their tusks to advertise the size of their testicles to females, and it would be a shame if they did fight using them like fencing foils, which don't worry, they totally do. But a study published in the journal p l Os one finds the narwhall in possession of the most powerful
directional sonar of any animal on Earth. Because, of course, lots of marine mammals use echolocation to find their way around in the ocean's murky depths, but this ability to use sonar to determine where objects are in space is especially crucial for narwhals. They're deep divers and just one of two species of toothed whales who live year round in the Arctic Circle off the coast of Canada. In Greenland.
The seas are most often completely covered in ice, and narwhales live in complete darkness for much of the year. Since the narwhale has to come up to the surface of the water for air every five minutes or so, they have to be able to precisely and quickly detect small holes and cracks in the ice through which to
grab quick gulps of air. Dr Kristen Latter, an ecologist at the University of Washington, told The New York Times, you don't see open water for miles and miles, and suddenly there's a small crack and you'll see nar walls in it. I've always wondered, how do these animals navigate under that, and how do they find these small openings to breathe. To find out, she and her research team placed microphones under the water around ice packs in Baffin Bay.
That's off the southern coast of Greenland and happens to be where of the world narwhal's spend their winter. The team then listened for the telltale sound of echolocating clicks. They discovered that not only do nar whales produce them at a rate of up to one thousand clicks per second and receive the echoes back on pads and their lower jaws, they can also direct them with incredible accuracy,
like the narrow beam of an adjustable flashlight. According to the researchers, it's the most precise directional beam of all animal echolocators. Other whales broadcast their echolocating sounds in all directions, which is useful for receiving data back from great distances, and it turns out narwhals can do that too. Other animals like bats also use echolocation, but the narwhal's ability
to focus its clicks bests them all. When narwhal's track prey, the study shows they can widen the sonar beam to take in a larger area In this way, they can get a sense of their surroundings with more accuracy than any other echolocating animal on the planet. Let this be a lesson to us all, then, just because an animal seems mythologically amazing, that doesn't mean that it isn't. Today's episode was written by Jesselyin Shields and produced by Tristan
McNeil and Tyler Clang. For more on this lots of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of my heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit thing i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.