Tag: animals

Superstitious Pigeons

By Anupum Pant

B.F. Skinner was an American psychologist, a behaviorist, and a social philosopher. He was also the inventor of the operant conditioning chamber – A.K.A the Skinner box, is a box which is used to study animal behaviour. For example, you can use it to train an animal to perform certain actions in response to some input, like light or sound.

Using one of his favourite animals, he designed an experiment where he trained a pigeon in order to examine the formation of superstitious beliefs in animals. Here’s what he did.

He placed a couple of pigeons in his setup which was designed to deliver food to them after certain intervals. Of all the things, the timing of food delivery by this apparatus wasn’t related to one thing for sure – behaviour or actions of the bird.

And yet, after some time in this automated setup, the pigeons developed certain associations which made them belief that the food came when they did something. They had developed superstitious beliefs.

For instance:

One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return. – Wikipedia

The bird behaviour isn’t much different from what humans do…

The pigeons started believing in a causal relationship between its behaviour and delivery of food, even when there was nothing like that.

It’s almost like the humans blowing on the dice, or throwing it harder to make a favourable number appear. Even when blowing or throwing a dice harder doesn’t hold any causal relationship with the event of good numbers turning up.

During other times, when people bowl down a bowling ball and twist  their bodies towards right to make the ball go right, they have in fact unknowingly developed a superstitious belief, just like the pigeons that there’s a causal relationship between turning their bodies and curving of the bowling ball. In reality, there’s nothing like that. The ball goes where it has to, irrespective of how they turn their bodies.

Just like in the superstitious pigeon’s case, the food would have appeared anyway. The pigeon didn’t have to do something to get it.

via [Wikipedia]

Subtle Differences

By Anupum Pant

Who’d have thought that a fun website like 9gag could teach you something useful. This is an artwork that I first saw on 9gag and wanted to find where it originated from (to give the artist its full credit). I believe, I Raff I Ruse is the blog which published it first. I could be wrong, but then the apparent source itself attaches no text that could confirms anything. And then it probably went on NPR, and consequently spread all over the web.

The artwork illustrates subtle physical differences between certain kinds of animals which look very similar to the untrained eye. It’s a very simple thing to know and you should definitely know it. The whole list includes differences between:

  • Ape and Monkey
  • Frog and Toad
  • Dragonfly and Damselfly
  • Ant and Termite
  • Wasp and Bee
  • Turtle and tortoise
  • Alligator and Crocodile

The Turtle and tortoise difference was one of these seven differences which I knew for sure. Then, I can definitely tell a wasp from a bee, an ape from a monkey, and an ant from a Termite, I still wasn’t very confident about the others. I bet you also knew at least one of these differences. And I hope you didn’t know at least one because I wish you learn something from this post.

alligator vs crocodile ant vs termite ape vs monkey dragonfly vs damselfly frog vs toad turtle vs tortoise wasp vs bee

via [9gag] and [NPR]

Australian Bird Makes Camera Shutter Sounds

By Anupum Pant

Until now I hadn’t even heard about, probably the most well-known bird of Australia, the Lyrebird. These birds are there on the 10 cents coins in Australia. Their feathers are beautiful, but what these birds can do is truly astonishing – The R2D2s of the real world.

The Lyrebird has been seen mimicking the sounds of at least twenty other birds. That’s not all. Some of these captive Lyrebirds have been seen mimicking sounds of human technology like a camera shutter, car alarm and a chainsaw too – as seen in the video below.

In 1969, as observed by an ornithologist in New England National Park, these birds were able to reproduce sounds of a flute, singing two famous songs of the 30s “The Keel Row” and “Mosquito’s Dance.”  They had learnt it from a farmer who used to play these tunes on a flute.

A word of caution

Although the video would lead you to believe that wild birds have started mimicking sounds of human technology, it isn’t totally true. The birds that has been shown in the video, in reality, are captive birds from Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary and from the Adelaide Zoo. While Attenborough makes it seem like the bird is mimicking “sounds of the forest”. these clips are not typically what these wild birds do in the wild.

Maybe it happens in the wild too, but it’s highly unlikely because the human technology sounds are usually lost amidst the forest sounds. Moreover, never in the past has there been a recording of this bird mimicking human technology sounds in the wild. Maybe they do, but science requires evidence.

Outperforming Humans – Speed

By Anupum Pant

Humans can use tools, communicate, count, make others laugh, socialize and are self aware too. We also have emotions and a pretty good memory. All of the things put into a single creature sure makes the “most advanced” creature we’ve ever known. But if these traits are considered individually, you’ll easily find an animal who beats us at one trait at a time. Today, I wanted to read and write about where humans stand when it comes to speed.

Talk about running speeds and the fastest person ever, Usain Bolt comes to my mind. A bolt indeed. As on date, if I’m not wrong, the world record set by him in the 100m race is 9.58 seconds. To put this human freak show into perspective, the average speed of the Jamaican sprinter in this race comes to about 37 km per hour (23 miles per hour).  And he’s clocked 28 mph somewhere in the race, they say.

In a world full of cars and planes, where distances travelled have become really huge, 28 mph sounds like a speed which does no good in our practical lives. And yet, it takes an Olympic runner to clock that speed. Normally, people run at about, say 10 mph. Damn!
The biological human limit to running speeds is estimated to be about 40 mph.

Quick fact: The fastest human objects ever are Helios 2 (a German probe) clocks about 150,000 mph. Another spacecraft, Juno does about 25 miles in a single second!

Now compare that with a Peregrine Falcon which can make use of the gravity and its perfectly aerodynamic body to travel at a speed of 216 mph (360 kph). But, that’s hardly any work for the animal. It’d the gravity making it fall.

In level flight, the white throated needletail (swift) can fly at speeds more than 100 miles per hour (up to 106). That’s the fastest bird if you do not count gravity assist.

An on land, of course the Cheetah takes the prize with about 70 mph of running speed. But, there’s a catch. If you measure speeds of animals relative to their body sizes, there’s a little blood sucking mite that beats cheetah by a huge margin.

The fastest swimming fish is the sailfish, which can swim and jump for small distances at about 70 mph.

Humans can swim at about 5 miles per hour.

Moving at 35 miles per hour a jack rabbit can travel faster than a human. The patas monkey, the fastest primate, runs at about 35 miles per hour too!

Now these are some animals you probably already know. Soon there’s more to come. In the coming days I wish to do a series on outperforming humans…Maybe I’ll write about endurance next.

Keep reading for more.

Do You Feel Alone? – By Kurzgesagt

By Anupum Pant

If you feel worthless or alone, or both, you probably are looking at things very superficially. It’s time to realize who you are and where you stand in this vast universe.

Today, I’m just going to leave you with a brilliantly animated, science + philosophical video by Kurzgesagt.

(Just that because I’m too tired to write and happened to stumble upon this amazing video which I felt like sharing)

Also, don’t forget to check out their other videos. All of them are brilliant. Yes, I’ve watched them all. [Channel link]

The Sweet Tale of the Mysterious Tree Lobster

By Anupum Pant

I do realize how big our world is and the sheer number of species that live in it. Also the fact that about 86% of the species are still unknown has me in awe all the time.

Yet, after having read about so many kinds of animals that live on our planet, after having documented them on this blog, I always feel that I’ve known and written it all. The very moment I start losing hope that I would never find an interesting animal ever again, something incredible comes across. Always!

Today, that happened again when I was reading an NPR blog. This time, there’s more than the species itself. The place where it lives is pretty awesome too. The most amazing part – This six-legged giant lives only there. That means, nowhere else on Earth will you find it! First, let’s see where it lives…

This is where it lives:

balls pyramid

I know, it looks like a CG mountain done for a fantasy movie. Trust me, it’s real. It’s called the Ball’s Pyramid (named after a European named Ball who first saw it in 1788) and was formed 7 million years ago due to a volcanic eruption. It is an awkwardly tall (1,844 feet) and an extremely narrow rock sitting in the centre of the sea. To the East of Australia, the red place marker in the following picture shows where the rock is located.

balls pyramid location

 What lives there? And how was it found?

There is an island – Lord Howe island – close to the rock. In the island lived huge “tree lobsters” (actually they were huge stick insects with a hard exoskeleton – Dryococelus australis). In the year 1918, a ship crashed on the island and brought with it some rats. The rats loved these tree lobsters and finished them off within 2 years. After 1920, these tree lobsters were thought to be extinct.

tree lobster

Of course there were stories of these insects living on a rock near the island. But no human wanted to climb the narrow rock to hunt insects at night.

Only in the year 2001 when 2 researchers David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile decided to climb up the rock to find out if these stories were real, they found something incredible. Poop of a large insect. When the came back at night to investigate, the shiny black huge tree lobsters were found! These insects had probably never been extinct.

For more than 80 years, 24 of them had been living on this rock, in a bush and no one knew how they got there. Probably they clinged on to birds or something. Also, according to the researchers, these creatures have never been seen anywhere else.

Where are they now

I’m not sure about where they are now. According to the 2012 NPR article which I read, a pair of these creatures – Adam and Eve – were brought into Australia. Eggs got laid and little Tree lobsters came into the world. Thankfully, the species was saved from going extinct. But it isn’t known if they’ll be sent back to their home island because the great-great-great grandsons of those rats must still be there waiting to finish these insects off again.

This is how the first ones hatched in the zoo…

Hit like if you learnt something from this article.

Dolphin Encounter – Touching and Mindblowing at the Same Time

By Anupum Pant

Like crows and humans, dolphins have an impressive brain-to-body ratio. Based on an assumption, intelligence of a creature is in proportion to the size of its brain, scientific research suggests that dolphins are the most smartest creatures on the earth, after human beings. H2G2 suggests the same!

  • Besides that, there are a couple of other evidences that say dolphins are incredibly intelligent creatures. For instance, the part of a brain where all the emotional and higher thinking takes place, is considerably larger among dolphins – in MRI scans. Also, dolphins show several human-like skills –
  • They can identify themselves in a mirror-reflection, displaying highly developed, abstract thinking and self-awareness – Like Elephants and Great apes. Although self-awareness is a highly debated topic, dolphins are definitely better than so many other animals out there.
  • To some extent, dolphins can understand numbers.
  • They are often found to be engaged in complex play – Like, they can make and play with water bubble rings (Video – It is mesmerizing to watch them play with the rings) They are also seen riding the waves. Just like humans surf on the waves.

  • It isn’t just that. Dolphins also live in social groups and have different names (Distinct whistles) they use to call out each other.

[More of Dolphin-intelligence feats here]

But, why am I talking Dolphins today?

Well, they are of course extremely interesting creatures. But there was a video I stumbled upon on the front page of Reddit today, which really touched me. Moreover, it made me appreciate the creature’s intelligence. This is what happens in the video:

A diver, Jack is seen swimming around with a couple of Manta rays in the Garden Eel cove, Hawaii. Out of some where, a Bottlenose Dolphin appears. It appears to be in trouble and then the diver notices a fishing line entangled on one of its fins. He signals the dolphin to come closer. It comes, and most amazingly it stays nearby and cooperates with the diver to let him cut the hook and the fishing line.

Dolphin comes near a human, turns upside down, as if saying “Hey human, I have a problem. Can you help?”

Just two things. Kudos to the human for helping it out. The problem is solved.  And cheers to the dolphin which leaves us mindblown, wondering about how intelligent animals can be! At times, even smarter than some people I’ve met. 

This Animal Makes its Own Food Like Plants do

By Anupum Pant

We have seen a Game of Thrones themed slug in the past. But today, we look at something that will completely blow your mind off. After giving this little article a read, you’ll be confused and wouldn’t know what to call this slug – a plant, or an animal.

Background

A just born Elysia chlorotica – a kind of sea slug – feeds on algae for the first few days of its life. When it eats algae, what it really does is, stores the chloroplast in its gut. By this way, it able to manufacture its own food later on. Just after those few days from birth, it can completely give up eating, and can survive on just solar energy, by using the stolen chloroplast – just like a plant does.

How is it a true hybrid?

Of course there are animals that eat plants, store chloroplast and use the solar energy in some way. But there is something in E. Chlorotica that sets it apart from animals like that.

E. Chlorotica is a true hybrid animal. Scientists have found that when it eats the algae, by some unknown process, it able to steal the genes from algae and can incorporate it in its own DNA. This gives it an ability to maintain the chloroplast cells by supplying them with the right proteins, and perform real photosynthesis in its own body. Without the gene theft, it wouldn’t have been possible for E. Chlorotica to live off solar energy for the whole life-time (around 1 year).

Photosynthesis in Humans?

The animal has baffled scientists. Before this, they hadn’t known that it was possible for DNA to jump from one kind of a specie to a completely different specie and impart a life-altering function.

No doubt, this opens up a whole lot of possibilities, but scientists say, photosynthesis still doesn’t seem to be possible among humans because unlike E. Chlorotica, our guts are designed to digest and completely destroy chloroplast.

[Source]

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Ultimate Problem Solving by a Crow

By Anupum Pant

Background

I know I wrote about how smart crows can be a few days back, but even when I wasn’t particularly searching for amazing crow videos, I happened to stumble upon an astounding video of a crow solving some puzzle. I was so blown away by this, that I couldn’t resist sharing another crow post in under two weeks. Hold your hats because this crow, nicknamed 007 will blow them off your heads.

Side note: Want to see a chimpanzee blow your mind? Watch him do a task that more than 95% of the humans wouldn’t be able to do as well as he can do it. – [Working Memory – Chimpanzees vs. Humans]

Alex studies wild birds which he releases after 3 months of research. This one is nicknamed 007 and it is about to attempt what Alex believes is one of the most complex tests for the animal mind ever constructed. The bird is familiar with the individual objects, but this is the first time he is seeing them arranged like this.

This video comes from a BBC show called ‘Inside the Animal Mind‘ hosted by Chris Packham. [Video]

In the video, a wild crow, previously not having learnt anything about the 8-part arrangement of the puzzle, manages to solve it with ease. I would have taken some time to figure out the solution.

8-Part sequence

  1. The crow pulls out a small piece of stick from a thread.
  2. It then approaches a box containing a piece of food and figures that it would need a longer stick to get it. It moves on with the smaller stick to take a stone out of another box.
  3. Takes out another stone
  4. And one more
  5. Drops one of the three stones in a box which needs the weight of all three to release a longer stick.
  6. Drops the second.
  7. And the third. The longer stick is released. It takes the long stick.
  8. Finally, the crow uses the longer stick to pull out food from the box mentioned in second point.

How I try to believe it

Although when I say that the crow wasn’t aware of the arrangement, I mean to say that it wasn’t aware of the sequence in which the puzzle was meant to be solved. It seems as if it was trained with the individual tasks.

I’m guessing that the crow was trained for some time to complete the individual tasks separately and not in a particular sequence. The 8-part sequence was probably shown to it for the first time. I may be wrong. But, I think when the speaker says, “The bird is familiar with the individual objects“, my interpretation makes sense.

If I’m wrong, I yield and state that crows are just too intelligent and are going to take over the world in a few hundred years.

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Raining Frogs and Fish

By Anupum Pant

Raining cats and dogs is a bit unlikely, but there is nothing wrong about saying, “it is raining frogs and fish”. It happens more often than you think. So, don’t be alarmed if one day you wake up and find fish on your terrace.

When we talk about rain, the one place in India which stands out is Kerala. As we’ve seen in a previous post that Kerala has seen red rains, it has also seen raining fish. This isn’t a joke. On February 12, 2008, people actually saw fish falling down from the sky.

Not just that. I’ve seen reports of water birds, tomatoes, coal, and even a boats falling from the sky.

Raining Animals

After a few moments of awe, when you look at the occurrence of raining animals with the science microscope, you’ll find that it is not something very extraordinary. In fact, there is a whole Wikipedia page on raining animals. It turns out, several places around the world have experienced raining frogs, fish, spiders, worms etc. And as always, science has an explanation for it.

How does it happen?

Water Sprouts: When tornadoes move on land, they can pick up trucks, houses, trees and what not. They suck up several things from the ground and cause total destruction along the path they travel. But, when such storms travel on water, they suck up water, fish and of course, frogs.

This experiment proves how a low pressure can pick up things. – [Experiment]

These things can stay up with the storm for a long time. And eventually when the storm comes on land and weakens the animals may drop down with rain. As a result, we see fish and frogs raining from the heavens.

Cute Aggression – Hugging The Life Out of Your Puppy

By Anupum Pant

Don’t you feel like pinching the cheeks of a chubby little baby or hugging the life out of your puppy? Even if a kid might find it unpleasant you pinching its cheeks really hard, or even if you’d not want to hurt a little kid, you’d still be bubbling to do it. What is it that forces you to vent out a physical reaction towards cuteness?

Most of us do and science proves that intense cuteness can often manifest itself as aggression. Rebecca Dyer, a graduate student in psychology at Yale University, has coined the phrase cute aggression for this feeling. Scientists are not yet sure on what causes this. According to them:

“It might be that how we deal with high positive-emotion is to sort of give it a negative pitch somehow”

Or probably you, in some way, want to take care of something by ensconcing it in your arms. And when you see and are not able to do it, you vent it out on bubble wrap?

Researchers carried out a study involving bubble wraps. It was found that people who were shown slides/videos of cute animals popped higher number of bubbles than the people who were shown something not so cute, funny or neutral videos.

A YouTube channel, SoulPancake, actually recreated the experiment in their studio and recorded positive results. It was found that cuteness evokes a physical reaction in most people.

Crocodiles Do Not Die

By Anupum Pant

Technically some animals like Alligators, Flounders and Crocodiles do not die. Instead of aging biologically, they just keep on growing physically. But why do Crocodiles all over the world keep on dying?

Senescence

In reality, we do see them dying. So, it would be right to say that they have the potential to live forever. To understand this we’ll have to first look at the term – Senescence.

Senescence is a term used to indicate gradual deterioration of the body with age. In simpler words, you could call it ‘aging’. Specifically, weakening of muscles, lowering mobility, poor sensory acuity and age-related diseases are signs of an animal showing senescence. Most animals exhibit Senescence. So, as we get older our deteriorated life parameters increase our risk of dying – Humans exhibit Senescence; Crocodiles do not.

Negligible Senescence

But, here on Earth, living with us, are a few species that exhibit Negligible Senescence. That means, they show almost no signs of aging, or they are ‘biologically immortal’.  Animals like these only die due to diseases, accidents or predators.

In animals, sea urchins, lobsters, clams and hydras are some examples. Vertebrates like a few Tortoises, Turtles, Crocodiles, Alligators, Rougheye rock fish and Flounders have been not observed to have aged biologically. That is the reason we had a 255 year old tortoise in the Kolkata zoo till the year 2006.

Among trees, probably the best example for an individual would be one Methuselah tree, which has been living for 4800 years. Its exact whereabouts are kept a secret to save it from us. On the other hand, a colony of a single tree has been estimated to be around 80,000 years old. It is also the heaviest known organism.

Side note: Tardigrades survive extreme conditions using a technique called cryptobiosis. They can die and literally come back to life.

Back to Crocs

Crocodiles have no such thing as old age. A 7-year-old crocodile is as good as a 70-year-old one in terms of agility and other life parameters. Aging has no effect on them. Although they can’t die of natural aging, they also can’t live forever. Nature has a way of killing them. The way they die is out of starvation or if they contract a disease.

They keep growing throughout their lifespan and they require more and more food. So, as they keep getting older they need a lot more food. When that amount of food is unavailable, they die from starvation. That is the reason we don’t see 1000 year old crocodiles that are 50 feet long. Still, see what this hunter shot in Australia in the year 1957 – It was an 8.1 m (28 feet) long crocodile!

huge crocodile in australia

Even if making human beings biologically immortal is an extremely controversial area, it doesn’t stop scientists. Scientists love to study organisms that exhibit negligible senescence because they’d love to find out a way to halt the aging process in humans by mimicking their gene structures. Probably, in the near future, we’ll find a way to demonstrate limitless Telomere regenerative capacity like Planarian Flatworms in humans.

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Sharks Are Not So Bad After All

By Anupum Pant

Sharks have been on earth for millions of years more than we have been here. Also, they haven’t changed much since a long time. The kind of sharks we see today, were the same sharks that existed 350 million years ago.

That means, modern sharks have lived happily for millions of years without eating humans. Even today, they aren’t very keen on killing us for food. They simply aren’t designed (or haven’t evolved) to do that. Humans were never a part of their normal diet. Instead, they normally feed on small fish. While a few other species of sharks may eat seals, sea lions and other mammals too. In fact, they can go on for months without food.

Funny as it may sound, sharks are scared of humans. When a shark sees a human in water, it gets confused and scared. It goes near to check,  and this usually results in an accidental bite. They don’t kill humans out of aggression. With 15 rows of razor sharp teeth on each jaw, even their gentle bites may kill a person. About only 20 out of 300 species of sharks are reported to have been involved in accidents with human beings.  About 100 such accidents occur every year.

Not being insensitive about human deaths: Can you estimate how many people do sharks kill every year? The answer is 10. Ten people, on an average are killed by shark bites every year. That is about 1/15 th of number of people killed by coconuts every year*
*Note: “150 people are killed by coconuts every year”, is a popular urban legend. The coconut death figure is a crude estimate or just a figure pulled out of thin air.

Nevertheless, the number of people killed by sharks every year is very very less (again, even a single human death isn’t really ‘less’). I’d rather not use statistics to prove my point. [image]

Why are sharks scared of us? … Why shouldn’t they be?
We kill about 100 million sharks every year. That is such a huge number when compared to number of people sharks kill every year. Again, statistics could be deceiving here. But we do get an idea. There is a massive difference in the number.
Why? Humans catch sharks for their meat, internal organs and skin,  to make products such as shark fin soup, lubricants, and leather etc. Some times, fins are cut and live sharks are thrown back into the sea, crippled. This eventually kills them due to excessive bleeding or other obvious reasons.

It is ironically that we move into their natural habitat and in turn blame sharks for destroying our boats, surf boards. Moreover, we are shocked to hear about reports of shark attacks on humans. Shouldn’t it be the other way round? We should stop looking at sharks as if they are the monsters; we are. At the same time, that doesn’t mean you should risk your life by going in shark waters to give it a high-five.

Random Science Fact:  

Only 14% of the Earth’s species are known to us. 75% of all the species on Earth will be gone within the next 300 years. Think about those species which will go extinct while we are here, and we’ll never know about them.

Tardigrades – Toughest Creatures on Earth

By Anupum Pant

Visit blogadda.com to discover Indian blogs
So, if you think elephants or cockroaches are tough, that could be because you probably haven’t heard about these amazing creatures called Tardigrades (picture).

What are Tardigrades?

Tardigrades, also known as moss piglets or waterbears, are oddly cute little animals that live in water and feed on moss. Their size ranges from 0.1 mm to 1.5 mm and they have eight legs (they walk like bears). The most extreme thing about these extremophiles is that they can survive almost anything (actually, they kind of die for a while with an option to come back to life later). Here is a list of things Tardigrades can survive. They can:

  • Survive without water and food for 10 years.
  • Waddle away in the vacuüm of space (for 10 days & get exposed UV radiation), come back and walk around as if nothing happened.
  • Survive 1000 times more radiation that would kill an elephant.
  • Live through extremely low temperatures (almost absolute zero) or high temperatures (~150 degree Centigrade)
  • Repair their own DNA after getting exposed to lethal amounts of radiation.
  • Survive pressures of about 300 Jumbo jets stacked on a person. (6 times more than the deepest ocean trenches)

Scientists love them

People at NASA and the European Space Agency love doing tests on them because they think, Tardigrades can help them understand the origin of life on earth (probably by supporting Panspermia). Also, scientists want to find out more about their extreme capabilities. If you ask them, if these things are aliens, they’ll tell you – “Probably not”

[Learn more about Tardigrades]

Bats Can See

by Anupum Pant

While every teacher around the world is busy teaching their kids that bats are blind, the contrary is actually true. Bats aren’t really blind and they can see pretty darn well even in low light. In fact, their eyes work better than our eyes do in a dimly lit environment (eg. Moon light).

None of the bats’ 1100 species are completely blind. Although, there are a few which depend heavily on a technique called echolocation to navigate around objects which are near, they still have to use eyes to see objects which are far away. Additionally, most bats like to hunt in complete darkness (to avoid competition from other birds), so they use echolocation during such times [because eyes need at least some amount of light to be present]. The daylight hours spent by them to groom or sleep don’t demand much of their visual skills, but that doesn’t make them blind.

One way in which bat’s vision is poorer than our visual ability, is that they can’t see colors like we do. Everything they see is in black and white. This disability, if you may call it one, is compensated by their ability to detect light waves whose frequencies lie beyond the human visible spectrum. Flying foxes, however, which are actually bigger bats, can see colors.

So, simply put, bats can see, but they don’t have to use their eyes to hunt or move around. This makes your teacher wrong when he/she says chides you with the phrase – “Blind as a bat”

Bonus Bat Facts

  1. Bats don’t carry rabies. However, like humans, the disease affects some bats.
  2. Apart from vampire bats found in Mexico, Central America and South America, no other bats suck blood.
  3. Bats hunt insects above your head, they aren’t interested in your hair or your eyes.
  4. Bats can catch insects with their tail or wing membranes.
  5. Fruit bats are also known as flying foxes, they eat fruits.
  6. Bats collectively eat tonnes of insects and protect our crops.
  7. Some bats eat fish and frogs.
  8. Bats’ dung, is rich in nutrients. It is mined from caves, bagged, and used by farmers to fertilize their crops.

Echolocation: A bat echolocates by sending out streams of high-pitched sounds through its mouth or nose. These signals then bounce off nearby objects and send back echoes. By “reading” these echoes with its super-sensitive ears, the bat can determine the location, distance, size, texture and shape of an object in its environment. In some cases, a bat can even use echoes to tell insects that are edible apart from those that aren’t. – [Source]