Also: biosonar, melon, clicks, Griffin and Galambos
Bats and toothed whales find prey by sending out sounds and listening to the echoes. Bat echolocation was discovered by Griffin and Galambos in 1941. We found no checkable paper on how far animal research informed the early, separately developed human sonar, so we make no claim about it.
Values as stated in the cited paper's abstract.
| Property | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Echolocating species | >1,100 bats; ~70 toothed whales | Moss 2023 |
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Moss and colleagues reviewed echolocation in more than 1,100 bat species and 70 toothed whale species, which converged on features like directional sound and faster pulses near targets.
As reported in: Moss, Ortiz, Wahlberg (2023). Adaptive echolocation behavior of bats and toothed whales in dynamic soundscapes. Journal of Experimental Biology. doi:10.1242/jeb.245450
Grinnell gave a personal history of the key discoveries in the decades after Griffin and Galambos discovered bat echolocation in 1941.
As reported in: Grinnell (2018). Echolocation: a personal historical perspective. Canadian Journal of Zoology. doi:10.1139/cjz-2017-0316
Wei and colleagues built a CT-based model of a bottlenose dolphin head, simulating how biosonar from the phonic lips travels through air sacs, the melon and other tissues into the water.
As reported in: Wei, Au, Ketten et al. (2018). Finite element simulation of broadband biosonar signal propagation in the near- and far-field of an echolocating Atlantic bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. doi:10.1121/1.5034464