Flash illustration courtesy Kelley Balcomb-Bartok/All Rights Reserved
Killer whales use ‘echo-location’ to locate and capture prey. Killer whales produce and emit a rapid sequence of sound pulses that bounce off objects (eg: fish, rocks, other whales, etc.), enabling them to find and catch prey, even in the dark.
Locating and catching food is a daily routine for Killer whales, much like it is for most mammals.
At any given moment, a whale may come upon an unsuspecting fish, seal, or other prey. The ability to locate and catch that prey is paramount to a whale’s continued survival.
In the dark depths of the undersea world where whales spend most of their life, finding and catching prey can be particularly challenging.
Therefore, Killer whales — like dolphins and bats — have developed a highly specialized sonar that relies on echoes from the world around them for navigation and to locate food.
Essentially, the whale emits a rapid series of high-frequency “clicks” from inside the nasal cavity. These clicks travel as sound waves through the fatty “melon” (see diagram at upper right) which acts as a lens, focusing the sound forward into the dark waters ahead of a traveling whale.
The sound wave “clicks” move rapidly through the water, bouncing off objects in the whale’s path. As the sound waves strike objects, the echoes produced bounce back towards the whale and are received through the lower jaw — which also contains a dense fatty material — and is then transfered deep into the whale’s inner ear.
This echo signal — “echolocation” — provides data that the whale is then able to translate into information of the surrounding world. Thus, whales are able to navigate through even the darkest ocean depths.
Killer whales also use echolocation to locate and hunt down prey. Once a fish or other prey has been located, they send out an even more rapid series of“clicks” as they focus in — and close in — on their often unsuspecting next meal. It is only when a whale’s prey is within a few feet that the whale may rely on eyesight to actually catch it.
