Fact: Bats navigate and catch tiny insects using echolocation. This system is extremely refined and
more sophisticated than radar. Bats can detect single strands of human hair and can easily avoid your hair.
And then there was Bugsy, who was kind of an idiot.
Didn’t scientists set up a high speed camera to see the amazing echolocation avoidance tactics of bats in action and actually ended up filming tons of collisions? I remember seeing that in some documentary.
Yep. Just because they are sensitive enough to detect something doesn’t mean they are agile enough to avoid it. I can see my environment just fine and I still give myself bruises walking in to tables and door frames.
Bats Crash Into Each Other All the Time, High-Speed Cameras Reveal
The sight of bats bursting forth from caves at dusk is majestic enough to dazzle any spectator, scientist, or Gotham City billionaire orphan vigilante. Comprised of hundreds of thousands of mammalian aeronauts, these massive clouds of biomass seem to move as one organism, demonstrating the extraordinary coordination of individual bats.
Or, so it would appear to the untrained eye. High-speed video cameras, however, reveal that bats are a lot more accident-prone than they look at first glance. A new featurette from the California Academy of Sciences follows bat biologists Nickolay Hristov and Louise Allen into the field near Hill Country in central Texas, to document the twilight flights of Brazilian free-tailed bats.
“We expected that they fly around each other and they never have physical contact,” Hristov said. “We have found, shocking to us, that bats crash into each other quite often. It’s a messy situation, but generally it’s very safe and it works very well.”
https://www.fcgov.com/naturalareas/pdf/batarticle.pdf
And then there was Bugsy, who was kind of an idiot.
Seriously echolocation must have its drawbacks. Cause I been hit twice by bats in the face. No issues. Just a half minute of WTF.
Didn’t scientists set up a high speed camera to see the amazing echolocation avoidance tactics of bats in action and actually ended up filming tons of collisions? I remember seeing that in some documentary.
Yep. Just because they are sensitive enough to detect something doesn’t mean they are agile enough to avoid it. I can see my environment just fine and I still give myself bruises walking in to tables and door frames.
Well, if so, I want to see a bloopers film with bats colliding in slow motion.
squeak squeak squeak WHACK SQUEAK SQUEAK
EDIT:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bats-crash-into-each-other-all-the-time-high-speed-cameras-reveal/