Abstract
The ability of bats to orient and successfully avoid obstacles in total darkness has been of interest to scientists for more than two centuries. Although audition has always been strongly associated with this ability, general acceptance of orientation by sound came only around 1940 with the elegant studies of Griffin and his colleagues (Griffin and Galambos 1941; Galambos and Griffin 1942; an excellent summary of this work is provided in Griffin 1958). They showed that bats are not only able to navigate through complex environments but they also can detect, identify and locate prey in the night sky by emitting loud ultrasonic calls and listening to the echoes that are reflected from nearby insects. Griffin (1944) coined the term echo-location to describe this form of biological sonar.
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Pollak, G.D. (1992). Adaptations of Basic Structures and Mechanisms in the Cochlea and Central Auditory Pathway of the Mustache Bat. In: Webster, D.B., Popper, A.N., Fay, R.R. (eds) The Evolutionary Biology of Hearing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2784-7_45
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