What do bats, dolphins, shrews, and whales have in common? Echolocation! Echolocation is the ability to use sound to navigate. Many animals, and even some humans, are able to use sounds in order to ...

Bats are some of the most highly specialized mammals to have ever evolved. This includes not only the evolution of active flight, but also their echolocation. This ability requires the bats to produce ...

Bats can learn to mimic specific sounds, which puts them into an elite group of animals capable of this. Studying how bats can copy noises could help us learn more about humans’ unique capacity for ...

Biologists attached tiny recording devices that looked like mini backpacks to bats. What they found revealed a surprising ...

Even in loud settings with tons of different noises, we seem to have a knack for focusing in on the most important sounds, particularly sounds of danger. If we’re anything like bats, it’s because our ...

Long-term memory allows not only people to acquire skills that rarely have to be relearned, such as riding a bicycle, but certain bats may also have that capacity. Biologist M. May Dixon of the ...

Listening for faint rustling noises made by tasty beetles on a quiet day is simple for bats hunting with their exquisitely sensitive hearing. So try imagining what it must be like trying to locate ...

For two summers in a rugged corner of Idaho’s Pioneer Mountains, the roar of rushing white water filled the air. But where the loud sounds prevailed, only gentle streams flowed by. These phantom ...

Tiger beetles generate "anti bat-sonar" to prevent echolocating bats from eating them, scientists say. An experiment suggests the beetles mimic sounds created by poisonous insects that bats avoid.