Bats!: A Colloquy
(Oct. 30, 2008) It was just another typical evening in the Stewart-Brown household.
ME: Honey, would you like to hear some fun facts about bats?
SCOTT: Actually, I was just wondering if there were any fun facts about bats I hadn’t heard already, so your timing is perfect.
ME: Did you know that there’s a guy at HSU who has developed software to record the sounds that bats make and then analyze the data to identify which species are out there? He got a grant from a program at the Pentagon to go all over the country and set up these bat-monitoring systems.
SCOTT: The Pentagon is monitoring bats?
ME: Bats hate our freedom.
SCOTT: Well, we always knew that. What else have you got?
ME: You know how they emit these really high-frequency sounds to help them find things in the dark? Turns out that not only do they catch bugs in mid-air, but they can tell from the way the sound bounces off the bug whether it’s the kind of bug they like to eat or not. They take about 10 snapshots a second of what’s around them, just using sound.
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