Echolocation

What’s that in the night sky?

Is it a bird?

A plane?

No, it’s a bat!

Peter wonders how bats can fly in the dark.

The next day, he decides to find out more by visiting Dr. Cuevas, a bat expert.

Dr. Cuevas shows Peter how bats live in colonies and hang upside down to sleep during the day. That means they are nocturnal.

Do you hear that?

It’s a bat. Bats chatter and make chirping sounds. They also do something called echolocation. They make high-pitched sounds from their mouth or nose. The sounds bounce off the objects around them like an echo. It helps them know everything around them without being able to see it.

Echolocation is how they catch their food too. Look at how this bat finds a moth.

Dr. Cuevas helps Peter understand with an experiment.

He takes out a bowl of water and adds a couple of blocks of wood.

Peter drops a rock into the middle of the bowl and sees that the waves ripple out. When they get to the blocks of wood, they stop and bounce back.

Dr. Cuevas explains that this is how echolocation works. The objects in the water stop the sound and bounce it back to the bat. That tells the bat that there is something there.

Wow! Peter thinks bats are really interesting. Dr. Cuevas agrees and hopes more people will have that opinion once they learn the facts about bats.