Echolocation and Humans
- Fiona Hamilton
- 9 hours ago
- 4 min read
People may have a bigger part in the story of biosonar than you may realize. Noise pollution caused by our technologies is putting strain on animals that rely on echolocation. But on a different note, we’re also learning that with practice, humans can also echolocate. So what do these two different revelations mean for the future?
Perhaps it would be best to get a better understanding of how echolocation works first. When I think of echolocation, my mind immediately goes to bats, but not all bats use echolocation, and neither are they the only animals that can. Toothed whales can also use biosonar to see in the dark depths of the ocean, and even some cave birds have developed crude versions of echolocation to help them see. Echolocation is when animals use echoes to locate things. Crazy, huh? These
animals can send out waves of sound and analyze the returning waves to understand their environment. Dolphins and other toothed whales, for example, send out the signals through ‘machinery’ in their foreheads and pick them up through their highly evolved jaws. This lets them ‘see’ things miles away.
Imagine you are standing at the edge of a canyon. You close your eyes and yell “Echo!” and wait. A moment later, quieter versions of your shout yell back at you from the emptiness. This is pretty much what echolocation is, except you skipped the most important step: understanding what the variations mean. A bat can send out an ultrasonic sound and quickly know the distance between it and anything that its signal bounced off of. You, on the other hand, would probably just be very disoriented if you just heard your voice echoing around you with your eyes closed.
However, echolocation isn’t exactly the same thing as seeing. It’s possible for animals like dolphins and bats, with more advanced forms of echolocation, to tell the difference between, say, a fish
and a large crustacean, but echolocation doesn’t deal with transparency. A human can see out a window and see that pizza is about to arrive. If an insect is behind a plane of glass, all the bat will see is a plane of glass. However, a bat would totally see someone under an invisibility cloak and wonder why all the other animals kept running into them.
But now we come to humans using echolocation, because a human using echolocation could both see the pizza through the window as well as the invisible neighbor who tries to steal it from under your nose. (Well, a bat might be able to do both, too; they do still have eyes, just not as good as ours.) Humans can learn to echolocate using tongue clicks. With time and practice, people can learn to understand the differences in sound between larger and smaller rooms. Not surprisingly, the blind can take, and have taken, great advantage of this, operating as though they had complete sight. However, sighted people can also learn to use echolocation; it’s just a little more difficult since we’re so reliant on our vision that we often don’t take full advantage of our other senses.
But even if we could all learn to use echolocation, it wouldn’t always be very useful in our modern world. At least, not without even more long hours of experimenting and practicing with it. We live in a world where noise pollution is a huge part of most of our daily lives. Cars, fireworks, washing machines, and even the fan you use to keep cool in the summertime all create excess noise in the environment. Even if you did learn how to use echolocation, with all of the noise around you, you wouldn’t be able to see very far unless you started clicking really loudly, which may be a bit awkward. But that’s exactly what bats have to do in noisier environments, they have to send out louder, higher frequencies in order to actually find the prey that they are looking for. In return, they are using more energy, so they need to find more prey. In the end, it’s just easier for them to try and find somewhere quieter, even if that means catching less prey.
It’s similar on the marine side of things. Ships, seismic testing, and oil drills all contribute to noise pollution in the ocean. Various sonar devices used in military training can create sounds that travel hundreds of miles away from their source. Whales don’t just use echolocation for finding food either; it’s a key part of socializing. Like us, they use sound to communicate. Have you ever
been in a loud construction area, or just in a loud crowd of people, and tried to have a conversation with a friend? You probably found yourself just nodding along to what they were saying without actually understanding them. In a loud marine environment, whales may have a harder time communicating, making it harder for them to work together as a pod. And this all becomes even more detrimental when you consider many whale species’ dwindling numbers and habitat.
Either way you look at it, humans are starting to play a bigger role in the history of echolocation. It’s up to us to choose whether we want our impact to be small but beneficial, or planet-wide and disastrous.
Sources:
About Echolocation:
Noise Pollution and Echolocation
Human Echolocation
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