A bat can fly around a dark stable at midnight without hitting either pillars, rafters, or sleeping cows. If a bat had hoped for its eyes in its movements along the night stable, it would have counted at least as many posts and rafters with its forehead as we have with you.
How do bats navigate in the dark?
Bats have developed a different way of orientation in the dark: they listen to the dark space. They fly out to hunt after sunset. During the day, they hang upside down in their houses - caves, in hollows of trees or in the canopies of village houses, clinging with their paws to the crossbars on the ceiling. For most of the day, bats tidy themselves up, preparing for nightly adventures: combing their hair with claws and carefully licking their wings.
Interesting fact: just like submarines, bats use sonar, or sound waves, to navigate freely in the dark.
Why do bats hunt at night?
Between these activities bats doze. When night falls, the bats leave their home and fly out to hunt. Some species of bats prefer fruits, while others, especially tropical ones, prefer blood-sucking species, they attack birds, cows and other animals. But most bats feed on bugs and other insects. Bats hunt at night, as darkness protects bats from animals that could eat them themselves.In addition, in night flights, their wide, woolless wings do not dry out from the hot sun.
How do bats see it?
To navigate in the dark, these animals use sound. In this way, they are similar to submarines, which also use sound waves to navigate the gloomy depths of the ocean. Bats send bundles of sound waves into space, they emit waves by mouth or nose. The waves are reflected from the surrounding objects, outlining their contours, and the mice pick them up with their ears and perceive the sound (acoustic) picture of the environment, in this picture they are oriented. The process of this orientation by the reflected sound is called echolocation. Big bizarre ears of a bat help her navigate the sound picture of the world in the dark.
Interesting fact: when the bat is aiming for prey, it emits a sound with a frequency of 200 beats per second.
The bat, which appeared in your bedroom at three in the morning, knows where to fly. She sends packets of sound waves and picks up their reflections. The waves are reflected from the armchairs, sofa, TV screen. Waves will not be reflected from the open window - that means the path is clear, and the bat has found a way out of the trap. The sound that a bat emits is also reflected from small objects. If the prey - a delicious fly - buzzes in the room, the bat will find it. Finding an insect, the bat makes a sound with a frequency of 10 beats (pulses) per second. Having caught the reflected signal, it increases the frequency to 25 beats per second, at this frequency the bat can more accurately determine where the fly is, so that the attack is successful.
Bats hunting
When the bat has set its sights on prey, it emits increasingly high sounds with a frequency of up to 200 beats per second. Then either she grabs a fly or misses, then everything starts all over again. Bats are good hunters and rarely miss. Usually hunting takes half a second. A bat can eat a lot of insects during the night: by weight it is half what the bat weighs. The bat absorbs such a number of insects in one hour of hunting. Some insects, such as mosquitoes, are very small and weigh almost nothing.
In this case, the bat eats more than 1200 insects per hour. How is this calculated? Very simply, the bat is weighed before departure for hunting and immediately after it, when its abdomen is stuffed with food. Some bats determine the location of objects with echolocation so well that in the dark they will not stumble on a wire the thickness of a human hair.
