Echolocation

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.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Kate Jones No other episodes
  Professor of Ecology and Biodiversity at University College London
• Gareth Jones No other episodes
  Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol
• Dean Waters No other episodes
  Lecturer in the Environment Department at the University of York

Reading list

• Acoustic Ecology of European Bats: Species Identification, Study of their Habitats and Foraging Behaviour
  Michel Barataud (French National Museum of Natural History, 2016) Google Books →
• The Blind Watchmaker
  Richard Dawkins (Longman, 1986) Google Books →
• Blip, Ping and Buzz: Making Sense of Radar and Sonar
  M. Denny (Johns Hopkins Press, 2007) Google Books →
• Bats of Britain and Europe
  Christian Dietz and Andreas Kiefer (Bloomsbury Natural History, 2016) Google Books →
• Bats: In a World of Echoes
  Johan Ekloef and Jens Rydell (Springer International Publishing, 2018)
• Listening in the Dark: Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men
  Donald R. Griffin (Cornell University Press, 1986) Google Books →
• A Guide to British Bats
  Kate E. Jones and Allyson Walsh (Field Studies Council, 2001) Google Books →
• Social Calls of the Bats of Britain and Ireland
  Neil Middleton, Andrew Froud and Keith French (Pelagic Publishing, 2014) Google Books →
• British Bat Calls: A Guide to Species Identification
  Jon Russ (Pelagic Publishing, 2012) Google Books →
• Echolocation in Bats and Dolphins
  Jeanette Thomas, Cynthia Moss and Marianne Vater (University of Chicago Press, 2004) Google Books →

Related episodes

• Pheromones
  
  21 Feb, 2019 590 Animals (Zoology)
• The Whale - A History
  
  21 May, 2009 570 Biology
• Mammals
  
  13 Oct, 2005 590 Animals (Zoology)
• Behavioural Ecology
  
  11 Dec, 2014 570 Biology
• Bird Migration
  
  18 Jun, 2020 590 Animals (Zoology)
• Circadian Rhythms
  
  17 Dec, 2015 570 Biology
• Perception and the Senses
  
  28 Apr, 2005 150 Psychology
• Fossils
  
  22 Mar, 2001 560 Fossils and prehistoric life
• Animal Experiments and Rights
  
  18 Mar, 1999 170 Ethics
• Oceanography
  
  22 Nov, 2001 550 Earth sciences and geology

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b0b6hrl3

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b6hrl3

Auto-category: 591.5 (Animal behavior and communication)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. If you could hear bats flying at night, they were deafenless.