Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, their brain stuff Lauren Vogel bomb here. All creatures living in the wild will try to gain an advantage when it comes to finding their next meal. Some animals will use their size big or small, while others rely on speed or the ability to make a threatening sound. But the bat has a different kind of trick up its sleeve or wing signal jamming. That's are nocturnal hunting mainly in
the darkness of night. They eat prey that's tiny and quiet, like moths and other insects, which can be difficult to find in low light and darkness. Although the expression blind is a bat is widely used, bats are not blind. They just use a means of locating these tiny tidbits of dinner other than sight. When it's time to find food, bats emit a series of high pitched sounds into the
darkness that bounce back when they hit an object. When a bat hears the echoing sound, it knows an object is nearby, and it flies closer to the source of the echo to send out more signals. As the echo back sound increase as an intensity, the bat knows it's getting closer to the prey, and it keeps up this echolocation until it can swoop in for the kill. While primarily using sonar to find food, it turns out the bats can also use their sonar in a hostile and
competitive way. Wake Forest University researcher William Connor and his University of Maryland colleague Aaron Corcoran used audio and video systems to observe the behavior of Mexican freetailed bats as they hunted for tiger moths, a favorite snack, but favorite snack of the bats not the researchers. They found that the bats emitted a specific sound that was successful in interfering with the sonar of other prey seeking bats of
the same species. They called this process sweep jamming. The study concludes that bats admit this sound intentionally to interfere with the sonar of food seeking competitors. When the researchers played back recordings of this jamming sound to other bats in search of insects, those bats were also thrown off track. The sound made the bats sent more likely to miss their prey target. The scientists expire rented with other sounds, like white noise, but those did not interfere with the
bats sonar. In the natural world, sonar and echolocation aren't exclusive to bats. Mammals such as dolphins and other toothed whales also use it to find their way, and humans too have adapted technology to mimic this process. Ships regularly use sonar to help them navigate and to explore what's in the water under and around them. Sonar can indicate the presence of another ship, a dangerous obstacle, or aquatic life.
In warfare, sonar can be life saving, cluing a ship in about the presence of a hostile submarine or an enemy torpedo. Technology can even jam the sonar of other ships, just like bats. There's no evidence yet that other animals that use echolocation for hunting employ signal jamming, but bats seem to have perfected the process of jamming one another signals, all in the search for a better meal. Today's episode was written by Debbie Swanson and produced by Tristan McNeil.
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