For visual animals, it's hard to understand how echolocating creatures perceive the world. Yet dolphins successfully hunt and communicate through a system of clicks and high-pitched whistles. So what do these echolocation calls sound like to dolphins? Songhai Li, Paul Nachtigall and Marlee Breese tested the hearing of an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin named BJ as she listened to echoes of her own echolocation clicks reflected from various sized cylinders placed 2–6.5 m in front of her nose (p. 2027). Recording BJ's electrical brain responses with a suction-cup recording electrode just behind her blowhole, they could see that the echoes and calls both triggered brain activity, although the responses to the echoes were weaker. The team also saw that the responses to the fainter echoes became stronger as the objects became more distant, ‘Demonstrating an overcompensation of echo attenuation,’ they say. And when the team measured the strength of the dolphin's echolocation clicks, they found that calls became louder as the cylinders became more distant. The team says, ‘The results demonstrate that a dual-component biosonar control system formed by intensity compensation behaviour in both the transmission and receiving phases of a biosonar cycle exits synchronously in the dolphin biosonar system.’
ATLANTIC BOTTLENOSE DOLPHINS USE DUAL-COMPONENT BIOSONAR FOR ECHOLOCATION
Kathryn Knight; ATLANTIC BOTTLENOSE DOLPHINS USE DUAL-COMPONENT BIOSONAR FOR ECHOLOCATION. J Exp Biol 15 June 2011; 214 (12): iii. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.060053
Download citation file:
Advertisement
Cited by
Meet the JEB Editors @ SEB 2023

Come and meet the JEB team at the Society for Experimental Biology centenary conference from 4-7 July in Edinburgh, UK. Visit exhibition stand 13/15 to pick up JEB centenary goodies, including our new ‘100 years of discovery’ T shirt, and join our Meet the JEB Editors event on Thursday 6 July at 12.30 at Platform 5 to find out more about the journal and chat to Editors including EiC Craig Franklin, Monitoring Editors Sanjay Sane, Trish Schulte and John Terblanche and the in-house News and Reviews team.
New funding schemes for junior faculty staff

In celebration of our 100th anniversary, JEB has launched two new grants to support junior faculty staff working in animal comparative physiology and biomechanics who are within five years of setting up their first lab/research group. Check out our ECR Visiting Fellowships and Research Partnership Kickstart Travel Grants. First deadline for applications is 15 July 2023.
JEB@100: an interview with Monitoring Editor Katie Gilmour

Katie Gilmour tells us how she first encountered the JEB Editorial team as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, UK, and how she would like to have a Star Trek tricorder to monitor fish non-invasively in the field.
The Forest of Biologists

The Forest of Biologists is a biodiversity initiative created by The Company of Biologists, with support from the Woodland Trust. For every Research and Review article published in Journal of Experimental Biology a native tree is planted in a UK forest. In addition to this we are protecting and restoring ancient woodland and are dedicating these trees to our peer reviewers. Visit our virtual forest to learn more.
Centenary Review - Adaptive echolocation behavior

Cynthia F. Moss and colleagues discuss the behaviours used by echolocating mammals to track and intercept moving prey, interrogate dynamic sonar scenes, and exploit visual and passive acoustic stimuli.
Crucial DNA at crux of insect wing size evolution
Keity Farfán-Pira and colleagues have revealed that a tiny region of regulatory DNA in the vestigial gene governs whether insect wings are large or small and has played a key role in the evolution of insect wing size.