Bats: blind hunters. What is the vision of bats? Is it true that bats are blind?

No, they are by no means blind.

Of the more than 1100 species of bats on our planet, not one is blind - moreover, many see very well. The suggestion that bats don't need eyes because they navigate solely by echolocation, or "sonar," is nonsense.

For example, fruit bats (also called "giant bats") echolocation is not used at all. Fruit bats have large eyes, good for navigation and for searching for food, which, as expected, consists of fruits. Echolocation- a thing almost useless for finding food that does not move from place to place. Instead, to find fruits, fruit bats have a well-developed sense of smell.

The common vampire, or desmod (Desmodus rotundus), is the only bat that feeds on the blood of mammals. She is not blind just enough to be able to see a cow for 120 meters in the dead of night, in pitch darkness.

Even the actual bats (Micrichiroptera, eng. microbats) - those that eat insects, include all the bats in Britain and really use sonar for hunting - with the help of vision (their eyes are small) they go around obstacles, recognize landmarks and calculate altitude your flight. Bats have good night vision. Nocturnal, they perceive everything in black and white, while fruit bats see everything in color, since their activity falls on the daytime hours.

There are several species of fish-eating bats in the Americas. So, a large fisherman, or a flying bulldog (Noctilio leporinus), having sharp eyesight and clawed paws, catches a fish from the water. Flying bulldogs are very easy to recognize not only by their 66-centimeter wingspan, but also by the disgusting smell in their places of lodging.

Few people find bats edible, but for special occasions (such as a wedding, for example), the Chamorro people of Guam in the Pacific Ocean boil giant fruit bats or "flying foxes" in coconut milk and eat them whole - with wings , hair, etc. This may explain why Chamorros are so common with a rare and very unpleasant neurological disease, the ALS*-parkinsonism-dementia complex. The fact is that Guam bats feed on poisonous plants - cycads, whose dangerous neurotoxins are transmitted (lightly flavored with coconut) to the unlucky feast.

* ALS (ALS) - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as motor neuron disease, Charcot's disease or Lou Gehrig's disease, named after the legendary American baseball player who died from this disease), a terrible incurable degenerative disease of the nervous system still unknown etiology. According to statistics, every year 1-2 people out of 100,000 get ALS. In the early stages, the disease manifests itself in the form of twitches, convulsions, muscle numbness, weakness in the limbs, and speech difficulties. Then muscle weakness gradually covers more and more parts of the body, and sooner or later the patient loses the ability to move independently. The disease does not affect mental ability, but leads to severe depression in anticipation of a slow death.

The Second Book of General Fallacies by Lloyd John

What is the vision of bats?

No, they are by no means blind.

For example, fruit bats (also called "giant bats") do not use echolocation at all. Fruit bats have large eyes, good for navigation and for searching for food, which, as expected, consists of fruits. Echolocation is a practically useless thing for finding food that does not move from place to place. Instead, to find fruits, fruit bats have a well-developed sense of smell.

Ordinary vampire, or desmod ( Desmodus rotundus), is the only bat that feeds on the blood of mammals. She is not blind just enough to be able to see a cow for 120 meters in the dead of night, in pitch darkness.

Even the actual bats ( Micrichiroptera, English microbats) - those that feed on insects include all the bats of Britain and really they use sonar for hunting - with the help of vision (their eyes are small) they go around obstacles, recognize landmarks and calculate the height of their flight. Bats have good night vision. Nocturnal, they perceive everything in black and white, while fruit bats see everything in color, since their activity falls on the daytime hours.

There are several species of fish-eating bats in the Americas. So, a big angler, or a flying bulldog (Noctilio leporinus), having sharp eyesight and clawed paws, catches fish from the water. Flying bulldogs are very easy to recognize not only by their 66-centimeter wingspan, but also by the disgusting smell in their places of lodging.

Few people find bats edible, but for special occasions (such as a wedding, for example), the Chamorro people of Guam in the Pacific Ocean boil giant fruit bats or "flying foxes" in coconut milk and eat them whole - with wings , hair, etc. This may explain why Chamorros have a rare and very unpleasant neurological disease, the ALS-parkinsonism-dementia complex, so often. The fact is that Guam bats feed on poisonous plants - cycads, whose dangerous neurotoxins are transmitted (lightly flavored with coconut) to the unlucky feast.

This text is an introductory piece. From the book The Psychology of Love and Sex [Popular Encyclopedia] author Shcherbatykh Yury Viktorovich

From the book The Complete Encyclopedia of Our Delusions author Mazurkevich Sergey Alexandrovich

Vision It is believed that carrots are good for the eyes. There is even such an anecdote: The patient asks the doctor: - Doctor, if I eat more carrots, is it true that my eyesight will improve? He answers: - Of course. Have you ever seen a hare with glasses? Seriously speaking, then

From the book All Masterpieces of World Literature in Brief the author Novikov V I

War of mice and frogs (Batrachomyomachia) Poem-parodyOn a hot summer afternoon, the mouse prince Krokhobor drank water from the swamp and met the frog king Vzdulomord there. He turned to him, as Homer addressed Odysseus: “Wanderer, who are you? what kind are you from? and came from where?

author Agalakova Zhanna Leonidovna

How we caught mice I got mice. That is, they were already there when I moved into an apartment in a decent house in a decent area with very decent neighbors. The mice lived under the washing machine, and its roar did not frighten them at all. They were brave mice. Sometimes they even climbed

From the book The Newest Book of Facts. Volume 1 [Astronomy and astrophysics. Geography and other earth sciences. Biology and Medicine] author

Which of the states in the UN has the largest territory and which is the smallest? Of the UN member states, the Russian Federation has the largest territory - 17,075.4 thousand square kilometers. Russia is also the largest state in the world by area.

From the book The Newest Book of Facts. Volume 1. Astronomy and astrophysics. Geography and other earth sciences. Biology and medicine author Kondrashov Anatoly Pavlovich

From the book Animal World author Sitnikov Vitaly Pavlovich

Which animal is the heaviest and which is the lightest in the world? Pygmy shrew The smallest of the American shrews, the pygmy shrew, weighs only about 2-3 grams. But it turns out that she is not the smallest of the mammals. Lighter than her tiny shrew - from 1.6

From the book All About Everything. Volume 3 the author Likum Arkady

Are elephants afraid of mice? It is because of the huge size of the elephant that we are so fascinated by the idea that a tiny mouse can scare him. People believe this, believing that a mouse can get into an elephant's trunk, causing him to suffocate. In fact, elephants are absolutely not afraid.

From the book All About Everything. Volume 4 the author Likum Arkady

How many types of bats exist in nature? There are an unusually large number of different types of bats, about a thousand. They live in almost all corners of our earth, except for the polar regions. All types of bats differ in their habits depending on their habitat. And all

From the book Foreign Literature of Ancient Epochs, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance author Novikov Vladimir Ivanovich

The War of Mice and Frogs (Batrachomyomachia) - Poem-parody On a hot summer afternoon, the mouse prince Krokhobor drank water from the swamp and met the frog king Vzdulomord there. He turned to him, as Homer addressed Odysseus: “Wanderer, who are you? what kind are you from? and came from where?

From the book All About Everything. Volume 5 the author Likum Arkady

How did it become known that bats have a locator? Most bats are nocturnal. They fly out at night in search of food. For centuries people have watched bats wondering how they find their way in the dark. And how do bats manage to find a flying

From the book Great Soviet Encyclopedia (VO) of the author TSB

"The War of Mice and Frogs" "The War of Mice and Frogs", "Batrachomyomachia", an ancient Greek poem - a parody (late 6th or early 5th centuries BC) of the heroic Homeric epic. Attributed to Pigret. The poem is connected with the criticism begun by the Greek philosophers

From the book Encyclopedic Dictionary of winged words and expressions author Serov Vadim Vasilievich

It doesn't matter what color the cat is, as long as it catches mice Words (1973) by one of the leaders of the People's Republic of China Deng Xiao-ping (1904-1997), who at the XIII Congress of the Communist Party of China (October 25, 1987) was named "chief architect Chinese reforms." Original: It doesn't matter which cat

From the book The Book of Practical Wisdom, or How to Outsmart the Law of Meanness author Dushenko Konstantin Vasilievich

TIPS FOR CATCHING MICE If you write a better book than your neighbor, or read a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, the world will lay a path to your house, even if you live in a deep forest. Ralph Emerson Before building the best mousetrap, it is worth

From the book Everything I Know About Paris author Agalakova Zhanna Leonidovna

From the book Drive Like The Stig by Ben Collins

3.8. Vision If you are in good psychological shape, then your vision becomes so much better, so clear that everything turns out naturally and simply. Ayrton Senna, three-time Formula One World Champion We have already talked about the importance of looking

Big night bat

Lesser brown bat

spectacled leaf-bearer

The closest relatives of bats in the Order of Bats are fruit bats (flying dogs, flying foxes, etc.) - so they just see perfectly, sometimes even better than people. But the Microchiroptera themselves, even those that actively use echolocation, are quite sighted. The sight of a bat doesn't hurt at all. Firstly, the animal must at least minimally distinguish the daylight hours from the dark (when it is necessary to start hunting). Secondly, the echolocation performed by bats has a very limited range (50 m maximum), and in the presence of a certain level of illumination, it is more convenient for mice to navigate in space using a more “long-range” vision. Thirdly, as it has recently become known, European great bats react to the polarized rays of the setting and rising sun and, by analyzing the angle of their incidence, calculate directions. It turns out a kind of compass, but not magnetic, but light.

It was originally assumed that the bat retina had only rods and no cones. Recall that cones come in different types and respond accordingly to rays with different wavelengths (that is, different colors). The sticks react only to changes in brightness and thus give a monochrome picture, something like what we see on night vision devices. So, it turned out that at least some bats can see a color picture, and their retina has both rods and cones. Moreover, the eye, for example, of such a bat as the spectacled leaf bat, common in South America, is sensitive to ultraviolet rays - the eyes of some insects have the same ability.

Sometimes the question of which sense organ - eye or ear - is used to make their way in space for certain species of bats is not easy to solve. In the course of experiments conducted by the University of Western Ontario (Canada), strange behavior was noted in bats of the small brown bat species. The researchers placed obstacles made of opaque, transparent and reflective materials at the exit of an abandoned mine where these animals live and changed the illumination in the area of the obstacle. It turned out that even in bright light, when the mouse's vision becomes the least sharp, for some reason the small brown bats prefer to use their eyesight and ... as a result, they often stumble upon a transparent obstacle. If they switched to echolocation, the transparent obstacle would be easily detected.

Instruction

Almost all species of bats are nocturnal, which means they must have sensory organs adapted to the dark. Indeed, despite the fact that bats have eyes with which they are able to see during the daytime, they mainly rely on echolocation.

Early explorers trying to understand the abilities of bats covered their eyes and covered their body and wings with a compound that was supposed to make their skin insensitive, but the bats avoided all obstacles without any problems. Only in the middle of the 20th century did scientists manage to figure out how mice orient themselves in space. During the flight, bats emit sound waves, and then catch their reflections from surrounding objects and thus create a picture of the world.

Bats make sounds in the ultrasonic range, so we cannot hear them. But the mice themselves perfectly understand each other. They have their own special language with at least 15 syllables. Mice do not just make sounds, they sing songs that not only help them navigate in space, but give them the opportunity to communicate. With their songs, mice identify each other, attract females, resolve disputes over territory, and teach cubs. Some scientists put the language of bats in second place in terms of development after the human.

Bats make strong sounds, so their ears are closed with special partitions during singing, if nature had not provided such a mechanism, mice would very quickly lose their hearing from constant overloads.

Unlike many animals that are nocturnal, bats hunt almost blindly. Contrary to the popular myth about their excellent night vision, they do not see well in the dark and are forced to navigate in space with their mouths and ears.
It sounds strange, but it's true - they make sounds, the waves of which are reflected from surrounding objects and caught by their ears. This way of orienting in space is called echolocation, and it is thanks to it that nocturnal predators can detect their prey.

Depending on the species, bats can feed on the blood of other animals and all kinds of vegetation, but most of them prefer insects. It is known that in an hour of hunting one individual can eat about 200 mosquitoes. However, they cannot get enough of mosquitoes alone, so they try to find and eat more nutritious bugs and caterpillars. Their search sometimes turns into a real test, because these insects perfectly disguise themselves in the leaves of plants.

Insect disguise

For a long time, scientists believed that bats had no chance of detecting insects sitting motionless on tree leaves. The fact is that if mice fly up to a leaf at a right angle, echolocation sounds are reflected from the leaf without any distortion caused by the body of the insect - in fact, the bugs become invisible to them. However, in the course of a new study, it turned out that predators are already well aware of this "acoustic camouflage" of insects and fly up to the leaves at an angle. Thanks to this trick, sound waves touch the bodies of insects and let them know that there is definitely something on the leaf of the tree.

Flying up to the leaves at a right angle, bats cannot detect prey

Scientists were convinced of this by conducting an experiment in which, from 541 different angles, they acted with sound waves on the leaves of plants with and without insects. During this process, they picked up the reflected waves and assessed at what angle the insects were best detected. It was found that for successful hunting, bats must fly up to the leaves at an angle of 42 to 78 degrees.

The most cunning animals

The next stage of the experiment confirmed that bats do exactly that in 80% of cases. When the scientists placed four bats in an enclosure with a few artificial leaves, an immobile dragonfly, and multiple cameras, the raptors actually approached the surface of the leaves at angles in the aforementioned range.
This behavior of bats was a rather big discovery for researchers. Now they believe that these amazing creatures have many more tricks in store that help them hunt even without good eyesight. Indeed, bats are amazing creatures, because their bodies easily withstand infection with the Ebola virus and other deadly diseases for humans.