Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogel Bomb Here, take a second to think about
Speaker 1: a nar wall. It's a whale with a unicorn horn
Speaker 1: of fairy tale animal, right, so it may come as
Speaker 1: no surprise that this improbable animal of the North Seas
Speaker 1: has actual superpowers. The nar wall's spiraled horn isn't just decorative.
Speaker 1: It's actually a modified tooth that can grow the lengths
Speaker 1: of up to nine feet that's about three meters. These
Speaker 1: tusks contain around ten million nerve endings. Some nar walls
Speaker 1: have two tusks, while others have none, and they use
Speaker 1: them for a variety of purposes, like testing the chemical
Speaker 1: concentrations in seawater. The males use their tusks to advertise
Speaker 1: the size of their testicles to females, and it would
Speaker 1: be a shame if they didn't fight using them like
Speaker 1: fencing foils, which don't worry, they totally do. But a
Speaker 1: study published in the journal p l Os one finds
Speaker 1: the nar wall in possession of the most powerful directional
Speaker 1: sonar of any animal on earth. Because, of course, lots
Speaker 1: of marine mammals use echolocation to find their way around
Speaker 1: in the ocean's murky depths, but disability to use sonar
Speaker 1: to determine where objects are in space is especially crucial
Speaker 1: for narwhals. They're deep divers and just one of two
Speaker 1: species of toothed whales who live year round in the
Speaker 1: Arctic Circle off the coast of Canada. In Greenland, the
Speaker 1: seas are most often completely covered in ice, and our
Speaker 1: whales live in complete darkness for much of the year.
Speaker 1: Since nar wall 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 Laughter, 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 our 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 bath
Speaker 1: in Bay Thu's off the southern coast of Greenland and
Speaker 1: happens to be where of the world narwhal's spend their winter.
Speaker 1: The 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 that 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 Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tristan McNeil.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other superpowered topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com