Echolocating whales use ultra-fast echo-kinetic responses to track evasive prey [article]

Heather M Vance, Peter T Madsen, Natacha Aguilar de Soto, Danuta M Wisniewska, Michael Ladegaard, Sascha K Hooker, Mark Johnson
2021 bioRxiv   pre-print
Visual predators rely on fast-acting optokinetic reflexes to track and capture agile prey. Most toothed whales, however, rely on echolocation for hunting and have converged on biosonar clicking rates reaching 500/s during prey pursuits. If echoes are processed on a click-by-click basis, as assumed, neural responses 100x faster than those in vision are required to keep pace with this information flow. Using high-resolution bio-logging of wild predator-prey interactions we show that toothed
more » ... adjust clicking rates to track prey movement within 50-200ms of prey escape responses. Hypothesising that these stereotyped biosonar adjustments are elicited by sudden prey accelerations, we measured echo-kinetic responses from trained harbour porpoises to a moving target and found similar latencies. High biosonar sampling rates are, therefore, not supported by extreme speeds of neural processing and muscular responses. Instead, the neuro-kinetic response times in echolocation are similar to those of tracking reflexes in vision, suggesting a common neural underpinning.
doi:10.1101/2021.08.10.455788 fatcat:7wdcyvqo35g6bh7c4pnhonw55i