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how do bats move |
Bats make sounds the same way we do, by moving air past their vibrating vocal chords. Some bats emit the sounds from their mouth, which they hold open as they fly. Others emit sound through their nose. It's not fully understood how the bat's sound production works, but scientists believe that the strange nose structure found in some bats serves to focus the noise for more accurate pin-pointing of insects and other prey. In the case of most bats, the echolocation sound has an extremely high pitch -- so high that it is beyond the human hearing range. But the sound behaves the same way as the sound of your shout. It 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. By determining how long it takes a noise to return, the bat's brain figures out how far away an object is.A bat processes all of this information unconsciously, the same way we process the visual and aural information we gather with our eyes and ears. A bat forms an echolocation image in its head that is something like the image you form in your head based on visual information. Bats also process visual information -- contrary to popular belief, most bats have fairly acute vision. They use echolocation in conjunction with vision |