What is Echolocation?
Bats are truly amazing creatures. Most people know exactly what a bat is and what it looks like, yet there are many myths surrounding bats that simply aren’t true. Bats are not blind, they are not flying rodents, they won’t get tangled in your hair and usually they do not bother people. However, they do have an amazing ability that scientists and the military have been trying to uncover for more than 100 years. They can see using sound – this is known as echolocation or biosonar. Even though bats have strong eyesight, they are nocturnal creatures that spend their waking hours flying at night in almost total darkness. They are easily able to avoid obstacles and feed on insects using their biosonar. A bat can readily eat 1,000 mosquitoes in about an hour using echolocation. Bats use their biosonar in a sound or frequency range that humans cannot hear. Human hearing spans from about 200 hertz (or 200 cycles per second) to 20,000 hertz (or 20,000 cycles per second). Bats can hear well into
