Bat navigation is one of the many wonders in the animal kingdom that never ceases to amaze those that have an interest in our flying mammals.
The type of navigation bats employ is called echolocation or bio sonar, this is how bats can navigate efficiently at night and catch small insects without necessarily seeing them with their eyes.
Bats emit a very high frequency sound that is typically not audible to the human ear , that travels through the air until it comes in contact with an insect.
The sound bounces off the insect and comes back to bat giving it the objects location , all of this happens at very high speeds which allows the bat to triangulate the insects position so it can move in for dinner.
The level of detailed information the bat can obtain through this process is truly amazing, for example a bat can tell how large an insect is by the intensity of the echo upon return.
They can even sense which direction the object is moving by the pitch of the returning echo, this how bats use the Doppler effect to triangulate their prey’s position.
Contrary to popular belief most bats have fairly acute eye sight and will use their eyes in conjunction with echo location while navigating and hunting for their meals.
All of this information gets processed instantaneously to their brain to form a real time 3d image of their surroundings much like normal human visual senses.