ArticleeLife2021
Echolocating toothed whales use ultra-fast echo-kinetic responses to track evasive prey.
Article in eLife, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Echolocators Are Smaller Than Their Non-Echolocating Relatives: Agility Counts in Dark, Three-Dimensional Habitats.Integrative zoology · 2026Article
- Review
- Humpback whale (Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Fast vocal-motor tracking of escaping prey in echolocating bats.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Cetaceans are the next frontier for vocal rhythm research.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Low hunting costs in an expensive marine mammal predator.Science advances · 2024Article
- A Survey of Sound Source Localization and Detection Methods and Their Applications.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Large sensory volumes enable Southern elephant seals to exploit sparse deep-sea prey.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Adaptive echolocation behavior of bats and toothed whales in dynamic soundscapes.The Journal of experimental biology · 2023Article
- Sowerby's beaked whale biosonar and movement strategy indicate deep-sea foraging niche differentiation in mesoplodont whales.The Journal of experimental biology · 2022Article
- The brain limit.eLife · 2021Article
- Echolocating toothed whales use ultra-fast echo-kinetic responses to track evasive prey.eLife · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on byThe brain limit.2021
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Visual predators rely on fast-acting optokinetic responses 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 100× faster than those in vision are required to keep pace with this information flow. Using high-resolution biologging of wild predator-prey interactions, we show that toothed whales adjust clicking rates to track prey movement within 50-200 ms 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 neurokinetic response times in echolocation are similar to those of tracking responses in vision, suggesting a common neural underpinning.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.