"I used to hear bats squeaking. Then for many yars, until quite recently, I used to hear their cries as a sort of clicking."
Richard Dawkins devotes several chapters to bats in one of his books, possibly The blind Watchmaker.
Fascinating stuff. In echolocation, they send out 30 clicks per second in normal flight. These clicks are so loud that their ears would be destroyed so they have a mechanism that disconnects the ear for the powerful outbound click and reconnects in time for the much softer incoming echo. When it homes in on a moth the click rate increases to 200 times per second. Dawkins suggest that the bats can build a mental picture of their world as good as our vision in daylight and even goes so far as to say they can probably detect some colour hue from the way that sound is reflected off a surface. Something to think about when you're watching Scooby-Doo.
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