Center for Active Sensing with Sound
Name of applicant
Peter Teglberg Madsen
Title
Professor
Institution
Aarhus University
Amount
DKK 24,963,525
Year
2024
Type of grant
Semper Ardens: Advance
What?
Principal investigator team: • Professor Peter Teglberg Madsen, Aarhus University • Associate Professor Lasse Jakobsen, University of Southern Denmark • Associate Professor, Magnus Wahlberg, University of Southern Denmark Predation is seen as a visual battlefield where predators utilize large eyes to inform the capture of evading prey. However, the largest groups of mammalian predators (1 in 5 mammals) produce loud calls and use weak returning echoes to find and capture prey in darkness. With this project we seek to understand how echolocating bats and toothed whales can use such active sensing with sound to hunt.
Why?
Echolocating toothed whales eat more food than human fisheries and bats serve as important ecosystem engineers in terrestrial ecosystems, but we do not understand how they catch their prey in an increasingly noisy world. By studying these echolocators we will understand how sensing informs behavior for wild animals and how our activities affect their sensory performance and hunting success.
How?
We will use small sound tags on wild echolocators to record their echolocation behavior during hunting along with returning prey-echoes to measure how they use echo-information to intercept and capture prey. This information will guide manipulated acoustic virtual reality scenes around trained echolocators to understand how they filter out noise and unwanted echoes to focus on prey echoes.