Till a few days back even I wasn’t aware of the existence of such creatures in Nature. I had not even thought of trying out something like this, even though it has been years getting into researching in this field. Nature again outwitted us in its design and complexity. I am actually talking about creatures having ears at a vertical offset to extract yet another dimension; depth that our ears/brain fail to solve through hearing. The Great Horned Owl (Bubo Virginianus), the Barn Owl (Tyto Alba) and the Barred Owl are some of such Nature’s selected gifted creatures. This offset helps them to hone on a creature with more sensitivity and helps them hunt down creatures even in complete darkness. With this ability they don’t even spare creatures like mice that usually hide under snow and manage to escape from their sight. Evolution has created wonders in Nature. These predators usually live in regions with long and dark winters and hence have developed the ability to “see” through their ears.
But how does it all work? With just horizontal offset our ears manage to tell us the direction of sound in the 3D space. Imagine it to be an arrow being hit in that particular direction. You don’t know the distance of the target but just fire it in that direction. The arrow actually leaves from a point which is the horizontal bisector of your ears. Applying the same concept on vertical offset there will be another arrow leaving from a point which is the vertical bisector of the ears (in the case of these specially gifted creatures). From primary school mathematics we all know that two straight non parallel lines can only meet at one point in space, which in this case happens to be the target.Even Nature can only produce best designs and not perfect ones and the Owls will definitely have to starve if their prey manages to remain silent. To make its design more reliable and worthy, Nature has never allowed a prey to have this very thought in its mind.
2 comments:
IS there actually a horizontal offset in their ears or do they bend their heads to get this effect ?
I would presume, we keeping our head at an angle will give the same effect ?
Excellent thought! The orientation of the ears also plays an important role in hearing. Your idea would work if you could keep your head at an angle and would still maintain the orientation of your ears as it is when upright. Changing the orientation of your head would never change the direction in which you sense the sound, right! Secondly physical horizontal offset is something that is commonly seen in Nature, like in our case. What I am trying to stress here is the physical vertical offset that is seen in these special creatures, like I have shown in the small kid photo in the previous post (that's actually me :)). Since its ears are hidden inside the disc like front face it is not exposed and so not seen in any of the photos I searched on the net. Probably you could shoot one when you get a chance. You can actually see that the right ear will be at a vertical offset compared to the left.
Post a Comment