Given the questions of how to manoeuvre in the dark, what solutions might an engineer consider? The first one that might occur to him is to manufacture light, to use a lantern or a searchlight.

Plenty of other modern animals make their living in conditions where seeing is difficult or impossible. Fish and dolphins that live in extremely muddy water cannot see because, although there is light, it is obstructed and scattered by the dirt in the water. Deep-sea fish and whales have little or no light by day or by night. Obviously the night-flying insects that they prey on must find their way about somehow. Bats are not the only creatures to face this difficulty today. Only after the mysterious mass extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago were our ancestors able to emerge into the daylight in any substantial numbers.īats have an engineering problem: how to find their way and find their prey in the absence of light.

In the time when the dinosaurs dominated the daytime economy, our mammalian ancestors probably only managed to survive at all because they found ways of scraping a living at night. It is probable that the nocturnal trades go way back in the ancestry of all mammals.

Given that there is a living to be made at night, and given that alternative daytime trades are thoroughly occupied, natural selection has favoured bats that make a go of the night-hunting trade. But the daytime economy is already heavily exploited by other creatures such as birds. You might say that this is a problem of their own making, one that they could avoid simply by changing their habits and hunting by day. Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark.They hunt at night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles.

Waves complete 9