A new model suggests the mucus
coating in dolphins' nasal passages is necessary to produce key characteristics
of their sonar clicks
Date: May 24, 2016
Source: Acoustical Society of
America
A dolphin chasing a tasty fish
will produce a stream of rapid-fire echolocation clicks that help it track the
speed, direction and distance to its prey. Now researchers have developed a
model that could yield new insights into how the charismatic marine mammals
make these clicks -- and it turns out mucus may play an important role.
The researchers will present
their model at the 171st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held May
23-27 in Salt Lake City.
"It's harder than you might
think to make loud, high frequency sounds," said Aaron Thode, a research
scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. "Wet,
sticky surfaces could serve a purpose in this."
Most scientists believe dolphins
create sound by forcing air through nasal passages located just beneath their
blowholes. Within the nasal passage are lumps of tissue, called dorsal bursae,
that collide and vibrate, producing the dolphin's repertoire of clicks, chirps
and whistles. Yet the finer details of what happens in the nasal passages
remain murky.
It's difficult to film a
dolphin's working nasal passages, Thode said, and many of the motions happen as
quickly as a thousand times per second, making it hard to measure them. In
place of direct observation, Thode turned to a lumped element model -- commonly
used by engineers and scientists to simplify complicated systems.
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