What Animal Has the Best Echolocation Abilities?

Bats, dolphins, and other animals all use sonar to navigate, but the narwhal has them all beat, and it's thanks to narwhals' distinctive horns. Learn how in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff,
Lauren vogel Bomb Here, take a second to think about
a nar wall. It's a whale with a unicorn horn
of fairy tale animal, right, so it may come as
no surprise that this improbable animal of the North Seas
has actual superpowers. The nar wall's spiraled horn isn't just decorative.

(00:24):
It's actually a modified tooth that can grow the lengths
of up to nine feet that's about three meters. These
tusks contain around ten million nerve endings. Some nar walls
have two tusks, while others have none, and they use
them for a variety of purposes, like testing the chemical
concentrations in seawater. The males use their tusks to advertise
the size of their testicles to females, and it would

(00:46):
be a shame if they didn't fight using them like
fencing foils, which don't worry, they totally do. But a
study published in the journal p l Os one finds
the nar wall in possession of the most powerful directional
sonar of any animal on earth. Because, of course, lots
of marine mammals use echolocation to find their way around
in the ocean's murky depths, but disability to use sonar

(01:09):
to determine where objects are in space is especially crucial
for narwhals. They're deep divers and just one of two
species of toothed whales who live year round in the
Arctic Circle off the coast of Canada. In Greenland, the
seas are most often completely covered in ice, and our
whales live in complete darkness for much of the year.
Since nar wall has to come up to the surface
of the water for air every five minutes or so,

(01:31):
they have to be able to precisely and quickly detect
small holes and cracks in the ice through which to
grab quick gulps of air. Dr Kristen Laughter, an ecologist
at the University of Washington, told The New York Times.
You don't see open water for miles and miles, and
suddenly there's a small crack and you'll see our walls
in it. I've always wondered, how do these animals navigate

(01:51):
under that, and how do they find these small openings
to breathe. To find out, she and her research team
placed microphones under the water around ice packs in bath
in Bay Thu's off the southern coast of Greenland and
happens to be where of the world narwhal's spend their winter.
The team then listened for the telltale sound of echolocating clicks.
They discovered that not only do nar whales produce them

(02:13):
at a rate of up to one thousand clicks per
second and receive the echoes back on pads and their
lower jaws, they can also direct them with incredible accuracy,
like the narrow beam of an adjustable flashlight. According to
the researchers, it's the most precise directional beam of all
animal echolocators. Other whales broadcast their echolocating sounds in all directions,

(02:33):
which is useful for receiving data back from great distances,
and it turns out narwhals can do that too. Other
animals like bats also use echolocation, but the narwhal's ability
to focus its clicks bests them all. When narwhal's track prey,
the study shows they can widen the sonar beam to
take in a larger area. In this way, they can
get a sense of their surroundings with more accuracy than

(02:54):
any other echolocating animal on the planet. Let this be
a lesson to us all that just because an animal
seems mythologically amazing. That doesn't mean that it isn't. Today's
episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tristan McNeil.
For more on this and lots of other superpowered topics,

(03:16):
visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com