10 Senses UNIT Passage 1 Science Sensory System of Bats Bats As humans, we use our senses to keep ourselves out of danger and choose our favorite food. But other animals use their senses for very different reasons. One animal. the bat. uses a unique ensing system called echolocation. This term is made up of two words"echo" and location." Using special sound pulses, the bat detects the echoes produced by those sounds. Its sensitive ears and brain see their surroundings. much like an airplane. Bats use this system to navigate through the air. Bats radar on can even find their way home from up to 600 km away using echo Echolocation As you can imagine, bats spend a lot of time hanging upside down in their caves. They have adapted to this peculiar living arrangement. When a bat wants to fly to a certain place. it uses the echolocation technique to navigate They do this by sending out a high-frequency sound pulse. Some bats create sounds using their mouths which they hold open as they fly. Others create sounds through their noses. When the sound pulse bounces off an object, like a cave wall, the bounce or echo comes back to the bat. The bat's clever navigation lets it know exactly how far away that object is. In addition, their large earflaps help them to gather and direct sound towards their eardrums. Bat Experiments The work of Italian and Swiss scientists in the late 1700s led to remarkable discoveries. One of the men stuffed cotton material into the ears of some bats blocking their hearing. The other put small bags over their heads. Then the bats were let loose to fly through the air. However, in both cases. the bats could not