Have you ever wondered how bats catch their food in the dark?

If you’re a nocturnal predator, hunting at night it can be hard to see your food!

Bats have a clever way of dealing with this, they use echolocation.

Echolocation is when bats make noises and the listen to the echo as the sounds bounce off of objects. This creates a ‘sound picture’ allowing bats to ‘see’ even on the darkest nights.
Bats are so good at using sound to see their environment that they can scoop up the tiniest insects mid-air!With echolocation bats can even decide which side of a spiders web a spider is sitting on and snatch it off of the web without even stopping!

But how do they do it? This week we’ll be talking about how echolocation works and finding out if you’ve got what it takes to be a bat!

Echolocation is when animals make loud sounds and listen for the echo of those sounds as they bounce off of objects around them. Bats can do it and so can some sea mammals just like Bailey in Finding Dory!

When bats echolocate, they use sounds which are very high pitched. This means that the sounds are very high, so high that humans can’t even hear them!

Challenge #1 Could you be a bat? -  Make the highest sound you can!

Challenge a friend or family member and see who can make the highest sound!

SCIENCE BIT!

High pitched sounds travel shorter distances than low pitched sounds. The higher the sounds the shorter the distance it can travel. The lower the pitch of the sound the further it can travel. That means that low pitched sounds can be heard really far away but high-pitched sounds can’t.

So how do bats make their sounds travel long distances even though they are high pitched? Imagine your friend is stood a long way away from you, how do you get their attention?

You shout! And that’s exactly what bats do. They make their sounds louder so that they travel further.

  

Challenge #2 Could you be a bat? -  Make the loudest sound!

Challenge a friend or family member and see who can make the loudest sound!

Challenge a friend or family member and see who can make the loudest AND the highest sound!

That means that when bats are flying around at night they are shouting at the top of their lungs. We just can’t hear them because their voices are too high for us to hear!

We know how bats produce the loud sounds they need for echolocation but how do they turn those sounds into a ‘sound picture’? The first step is to catch the sounds as they bounce back. For this, bats have really big ears. Their big ears maximise the sounds they pick-up, some bats can even change the shape of their ears to help them to hear better! Once they capture the sounds with their large ears the information goes to the bats brain where it is transformed from sounds into a picture of the bats surroundings.

Challenge #3 Could you be a bat? -  Make yourself some bat ears!

Find our making bat ears tutorial on our Padlet page, print it out and have a go!

So now we know how bats make the loud sounds that they need for echolocation and how capture and use those sounds to sense their environment. Check out the next blog post to find out how bats hunt and capture their prey, what bats eat and for our final three Could You Be a Bat? Challenges.

We’re Going Wild in Bryn Bach Park, Saturday the 9^th of June! Come and meet a real live bat, take part in our LIVE could you be a bat challenges and ask us any bat-related questions! We’ll see you there!