About Animal Bioacoustics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bioacoustics
is a cross-disciplinary science that combines biology and acoustics.
Usually it refers to the investigation of sound production, dispersion
through elastic media, and reception in animals, including humans.
This
involves neurophysiological and anatomical basis of sound production
and detection, and relation of acoustic signals to the medium they
disperse through. The findings give us some evidence about the
evolution of acoustic mechanisms, and from that, the evolution of
animals that employ them.
In underwater acoustics and
fisheries acoustics the term is also used to mean the effect of plants
and animals on sound propagated underwater, usually in reference to the
use of sonar technology for biomass estimation.
Sounds
used by animals that fall within the scope of bioacoustics include a
wide range of frequencies and media, and are often not sound in the
strict sense of the word, i.e. compression waves that propagate through
air and are detectable by the human ear. Katydid crickets, for example,
communicate by sounds with frequencies higher than 100 kHz, far into
the ultrasound range.[6] Lower, but still in ultrasound, are sounds
used by bats for echolocation. On the other side of the frequency
spectrum are low frequency-vibrations, often not detected by hearing
organs, but with other, less specialized sense organs. The examples
include ground vibrations produced by elephants whose principal
frequency component is around 15 Hz, and low- to medium-frequency
substrate-borne vibrations used by most insect orders[7]. Many animal
sounds, however, do fall within the frequency range detectable by a
human ear, between 50 and 15,000 Hz. Mechanisms for sound production
and detection are just as diverse as the signals themselves.
We provide expert consulting services in animal bioacoustics research and educations in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean Region. 