Which Animal Has The Most Extreme Sense of Hearing?

Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - 12:00 in Biology & Nature

The Animal Kingdom Wikimedia Commons You might be surprised at the answer! Or you might not. I don't know your depth of knowledge of animal sensory organs. Our old friend, the bat, is the king of extreme hearing in the mammalian world. It uses echolocation, emitting ultrasonic sounds and measuring the length of time before the sounds echo back, in order to locate prey. But it turns out there's an animal that uses an even more extreme variety of sounds--and it's theorized that it's a direct response to the bats. Ultrasound simply refers to a sound that is outside a human's sonic range--which isn't that hard, really, as humans have modest auditory abilities. Researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland have discovered that the greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella), a dull-colored, generally boring and common moth, has the most extreme hearing sense of any known animal. It's capable of hearing...

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