the.com/echolocation
Seeing with sound by shouting into the dark and listening to what shouts back.
means A biological sonar system where animals emit sound waves and interpret the returning echoes to sense the location, distance, and shape of objects around them.
from Built from 'echo' (Greek ēkhō, a nymph in myth condemned to only repeat others' words) plus 'location,' from Latin locus, 'place.' The compound word itself is a 20th-century scientific coinage, assembled once researchers confirmed that bats and later dolphins navigate by timing their own cries bouncing back to them — the term naming a trick nature had been using long before humans had a word for it.
- bats use
- frequencies far above human hearing range
- blind humans
- can learn click based echolocation too
- dolphins detect
- objects through sand and murky water
- precision
- bats catch insects smaller than a fingernail