Friday, February 27, 2009
Bats and Echolocation
This article is about how a bat would navigate through a place with echolocation. As we all know, people always describe a bat as blind. Therefore, we had the impression that a bat does not have the sense of sight. Furthermore, a bat is more likely known as a nocturnal mammal. True enough, a bat does not use their eyes to sense where they are going. Instead, they depend on their pair of ears. So, how do they navigate through the night when it is completely dark and the moonlight is the likeliest source of light?
Through this article, I learnt how a bat navigates itself through the night. Echolocation is actually by rushing air from your lungs past your vibrating vocal chords. These vibrations caused sound waves. The changing air pressure pushes surrounding air particles out and then pulls them back in. These particles then push and pull the particles next to them, passing on the energy and pattern of the sound. In this way, sound can travel long distances through the air. However, bats produce sound from either their mouth or nose. For most bats, the echolocation sound has an extremely high pitch (ultrasound). The sound travels through the air as a wave, and the energy of this wave bounces off any object it comes across. A bat emits a sound wave and listens carefully to the echoes that return to it. The bat's brain processes the returning information the same way we processed our shouting sound using a stopwatch and calculator. Therefore, a bat can determine where an obstacle is, the size of it and which direction is it moving to. This is how a bat navigates trough echolocation.
After reading this interesting article, I wonder if scientists or researchers could use this echolocation to help the blind. Since the bat can still navigate itself without its sense of sight, there must be some possibility that a human being could also use echolocation to navigate its ways through busy streets. I really look forward to researchers applying echolocation to a blind person’s life, so that they would not have to carry a walking stick wherever they go. If it really does happen, it would add to our noise pollution.
Done by : Quek Jian Ler [32]
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/bat2.htm ¶ 11:44 PM
Through this article, I learnt how a bat navigates itself through the night. Echolocation is actually by rushing air from your lungs past your vibrating vocal chords. These vibrations caused sound waves. The changing air pressure pushes surrounding air particles out and then pulls them back in. These particles then push and pull the particles next to them, passing on the energy and pattern of the sound. In this way, sound can travel long distances through the air. However, bats produce sound from either their mouth or nose. For most bats, the echolocation sound has an extremely high pitch (ultrasound). The sound travels through the air as a wave, and the energy of this wave bounces off any object it comes across. A bat emits a sound wave and listens carefully to the echoes that return to it. The bat's brain processes the returning information the same way we processed our shouting sound using a stopwatch and calculator. Therefore, a bat can determine where an obstacle is, the size of it and which direction is it moving to. This is how a bat navigates trough echolocation.
After reading this interesting article, I wonder if scientists or researchers could use this echolocation to help the blind. Since the bat can still navigate itself without its sense of sight, there must be some possibility that a human being could also use echolocation to navigate its ways through busy streets. I really look forward to researchers applying echolocation to a blind person’s life, so that they would not have to carry a walking stick wherever they go. If it really does happen, it would add to our noise pollution.
Done by : Quek Jian Ler [32]
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/bat2.htm ¶ 11:44 PM
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