Natures wonders: bat radar tells distance (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 05, 2021, 18:32 (1085 days ago) @ David Turell

When a bat pounces on an insect in mid-flight it automatically calculates distance, a process it knew in childhood!:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2276404-bats-dont-have-to-learn-the-speed-of-sound...

"Bats are born knowing the speed of sound. This may not be shocking, as they rely on echolocation to find food and avoid crashing into trees in the dark. But unlike birds that learn their songs, or lions that learn to hunt, bats seem to be born knowing how to echolocate.

"Bats make high-pitched calls that reflect off distant objects, and then they translate the time until the echo returns into some measure of distance. Depending on air temperature, sound can move faster or slower, and it is a reasonable expectation that bats would accommodate for this.

"To see whether bats can adjust their echolocation to accommodate changes in the speed of sound, Eran Amichai and Yossi Yovel at Tel Aviv University in Israel trained eight adult Kuhl’s pipistrelle bats (Pipistrellus kuhlii) to fly to a perch within a chamber pumped full of oxygen and helium. Because helium is less dense than other atmospheric gases, sound travels faster through it.

"The helium interfered with the bats’ echolocation timing and caused them to aim short of the perch. At first, this was expected, but the adult bats never learned to adjust.

***

"Both experiments indicate that bats have a rigid, innate reference for the speed of sound. The team says they expect this to be the same in all bats, as the brain structures involved in echolocation are similar across species.

"Because it is such a crucial part of the way the bat understands its world, Yovel says, it is possible that an innate sense of time from birth might be more beneficial than a flexible one that takes a while to learn, even if it isn’t always perfect."

Comment: If bats originally learned to judge distance and created an instinct how did the initial bats catch insects in flight to have enough food to survive. In bats lifestyle they must have enough daily supply of insects to survive. Only God's design of the species fits the facts. This is in addition to the fact bats are the only flying mammals with no known predecessor.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bats-evolution-history-180974610/

Despite these strides, scientists are left with some big questions. For one thing: The 50-million-year-old bat specimens are already recognizable as bats, so where did they come from? When, where, why and how the first bats become airborne is another mystery buried by Deep Time.

Comment: Sure smells of God's design.