What: Predation is seen as a visual battlefield where predators utilize large eyes to inform the capture of evading prey. However, the largest groups of mammalian predators (1 in 5 mammals) produce loud calls and use returning echoes to find and capture prey in darkness. At the Carlsberg Foundation Semper Ardens Center for Active Sensing with Sound, we seek to understand how echolocating bats and toothed whales use sound to hunt in the dark.
Why: Echolocating toothed whales eat more food than human fisheries and bats serve as important ecosystem engineers in terrestrial ecosystems, but we do not understand how they catch their prey in an increasingly noisy world. By studying these echolocators we investigate how sensing informs behavior for wild animals and how our activities affect their sensory performance and hunting success.
How: We use small sound tags on wild echolocators to record their echolocation & behaviour during hunting along with returning prey-echoes to measure how they use echo-information to intercept and capture prey. This information in turn guide manipulated acoustic virtual reality scenes around trained echolocators to understand how they filter out noise and unwanted echoes to focus on prey echoes in a complex dynamic world.
