Contribution
How to Hunt with Sound in Darkness
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Echolocating whales emit powerful clicks and listen for weak echoes milliseconds later to navigate and hunt for prey in the deep sea. They control sensory flow by the sounds they produce to define the temporal resolution and spatial extent of their umwelt, enabling dynamic control of attention in response to environmental complexity and prey behaviour. Hence how hunting whales manipulate their perception of their environment is revealed by the sonar pulses they emit, the echoes they receive and induced behavioral changes; all of which can now be sampled in the wild by small sound recording tags. Using such data, I will discuss how wild toothed whales detect, discriminate, and track prey for capture with echolocation. Wild toothed whales can detect prey with just a few clicks and inform both discrimination and motor adjustments during approach to the prey at low sampling rates. Prey specific motor patterns during approach show echo-based prey recognition at ranges of well more than 10 meters, allowing for deliberate sensory-motor planning. When prey is close, the whale switches to high rate clicking at very low levels to generate simple and very small sensory volumes with very high update rates on prey location to mitigate prey escapes.