Visualizing a bat’s biosonar

Bats have evolved highly optimized biosonar systems through which they broadcast ultrasound at various frequencies and then detect the echoes to sense their surroundings, all while darting through the air at high speed. At the Acoustical Society of America’s May meeting in New York, Rolf M$uUller (University of Southern Denmark) presented a multinational team’s high-resolution, three-dimensional views of how a bat’s ear probes space as the animal whistles on its way. The team first digitally reproduced ears from CT scans and then modeled the diffraction of ultrasound in the ears’ structures. To understand how the anatomical details of an ear bring about the spatial sensitivity patterns, the digital ears’ features were altered, for example, as shown here. The results of the computational experiments vary considerably with bat species and with anatomical changes. Müller said that tapping into this biological knowledge base may help the development of a new generation of compact antennas.