Study
Listening in the Dark: The Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men
Griffin, Donald R.
Yale University Press, 1958
A book-length account of how bat orientation was worked out, from the eighteenth-century blinding and deafening experiments through to the ultrasonic recordings of the 1930s and 1940s that finally made the calls audible to investigators, together with the obstacle-avoidance and prey-capture work that followed.
- Studied in
- Chiroptera
- Sample size
- monograph synthesising two decades of experiments
Bats emit ultrasonic pulses and orient by their echoes: deafened bats collide with obstacles that blinded bats avoid, and the pulses are produced in the larynx and shortened dramatically as a target is approached.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Bats navigate and hunt by an acoustic sense that the author names echolocation, comparable in function to sonar and independently evolved.
How NatureHQ reads it
This is where the word comes from, and the history in it is the best argument in the book. Spallanzani established in the 1790s that a blinded bat flies normally and a deafened one does not, which is essentially the right answer — and it was dismissed and forgotten for a century and a half because the sounds involved were above human hearing and therefore, to everyone who checked, absent. The result waited for a microphone. It is the clearest case in this corpus of an instrument rather than an idea being the limiting factor.
- A 1958 synthesis; the frequency-modulated and constant-frequency distinction and Doppler compensation were characterised afterwards.
- Concentrates on the species available to North American laboratories.
- Human echolocation, which the subtitle promises, is covered thinly by modern standards.
The bat experiment that needed a microphone from the future
How does a bat avoid obstacles in complete darkness?
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
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Published by: Academic book publishersPublished as an academic monograph.
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