Echolocation Forces Poor Bats to Nosedive Into Metal

It ai n’t soft being a bat , what with hanging upside down , andextinction threats . Butfascinating researchshows they ’re also helpless against their innate echolocation horse sense , which makes them attempt to tope from metal sheets they detect as still water .

The above picture from Nature illustrates unexampled findings about the navigational capabilities of the little wing guy cable . It turns out bats rely tremendously on their power to echolocate , using it to realize a sweeping understanding of their surroundings — not just for hunting glitch .

investigator discovered this when they experiment with young and capture bats , never before exposed to bodies of water . Despite their nature naïvety , the squash racket instinctively ( and mistakenly ) describe smooth metal sheets as pee , and attempted to dive into them for a crapulence . Textured surfaces , on the other paw , were push aside . This shows that a cricket bat ’s ability to map out its environment is a built - in feature — not one learned with experience . That ’s some serious hardware . [ PopSci ]