Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Bomb and this this is a
Speaker 1: classic episode from our archives, and this one we talk
Speaker 1: about how echolocation works and what animals do it best.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bomb. Here, take a second
Speaker 1: to think about a nar wall. It's a whale with
Speaker 1: a unicorn horn of fairytale animal right, so it may
Speaker 1: come as no surprise that this improbable animal of the
Speaker 1: North Seas has actual superpowers. The nar walls spiral horn
Speaker 1: isn't just decorative. It's actually a modified tooth that can
Speaker 1: grow to lengths of up to nine feet that's about
Speaker 1: three meters. These tusks contain around ten million nerve endings.
Speaker 1: Some nar walls have two tusks, while others have none,
Speaker 1: and they use them for a variety of purposes, like
Speaker 1: testing the chemical concentrations in seawater. The males use their
Speaker 1: tusks to advertise the size of their testicles to females,
Speaker 1: and it would be a shame if they did fight
Speaker 1: using them like fencing foils, which don't worry, they totally do.
Speaker 1: But a study published in the journal p l Os
Speaker 1: one finds the narwhall in possession of the most powerful
Speaker 1: directional sonar of any animal on Earth. Because, of course,
Speaker 1: lots of marine mammals use echolocation to find their way
Speaker 1: around in the ocean's murky depths, but this ability to
Speaker 1: use sonar to determine where objects are in space is
Speaker 1: especially crucial for narwhals. They're deep divers and just one
Speaker 1: of two species of toothed whales who live year round
Speaker 1: in the Arctic Circle off the coast of Canada. In Greenland.
Speaker 1: The seas are most often completely covered in ice, and
Speaker 1: narwhales live in complete darkness for much of the year.
Speaker 1: Since the narwhale has to come up to the surface
Speaker 1: of the water for air every five minutes or so,
Speaker 1: they have to be able to precisely and quickly detect
Speaker 1: small holes and cracks in the ice through which to
Speaker 1: grab quick gulps of air. Dr Kristen Latter, an ecologist
Speaker 1: at the University of Washington, told The New York Times,
Speaker 1: you don't see open water for miles and miles, and
Speaker 1: suddenly there's a small crack and you'll see nar walls
Speaker 1: in it. I've always wondered, how do these animals navigate
Speaker 1: under that, and how do they find these small openings
Speaker 1: to breathe. To find out, she and her research team
Speaker 1: placed microphones under the water around ice packs in Baffin Bay.
Speaker 1: That's off the southern coast of Greenland and happens to
Speaker 1: be where of the world narwhal's spend their winter. The
Speaker 1: team then listened for the telltale sound of echolocating clicks.
Speaker 1: They discovered that not only do nar whales produce them
Speaker 1: at a rate of up to one thousand clicks per
Speaker 1: second and receive the echoes back on pads and their
Speaker 1: lower jaws, they can also direct them with incredible accuracy,
Speaker 1: like the narrow beam of an adjustable flashlight. According to
Speaker 1: the researchers, it's the most precise directional beam of all
Speaker 1: animal echolocators. Other whales broadcast their echolocating sounds in all directions,
Speaker 1: which is useful for receiving data back from great distances,
Speaker 1: and it turns out narwhals can do that too. Other
Speaker 1: animals like bats also use echolocation, but the narwhal's ability
Speaker 1: to focus its clicks bests them all. When narwhal's track prey,
Speaker 1: the study shows they can widen the sonar beam to
Speaker 1: take in a larger area In this way, they can
Speaker 1: get a sense of their surroundings with more accuracy than
Speaker 1: any other echolocating animal on the planet. Let this be
Speaker 1: a lesson to us all, then, just because an animal
Speaker 1: seems mythologically amazing, that doesn't mean that it isn't. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by Jesselyin Shields and produced by Tristan
Speaker 1: McNeil and Tyler Clang. For more on this lots of
Speaker 1: other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff
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