Faster than the blink of an eye

In the animal world, split-second decisions determine whether a predator eats, or its prey survives. There is a strong evolutionary advantage to fast reacting brains and bodies. For example, the eye muscles of hunting cheetahs must lock on to a gazelle and keep track of it, no matter how quickly or unpredictably it moves. In fact, in monkeys and primates, these muscles can react to sudden movements in as little as 50 milliseconds – faster than the blink of an eye. But what about animals that do not rely on vision to hunt?

To find food at night or in the deep ocean, whales and porpoises make short ultrasonic sounds, or ‘clicks’, and then listen for returning echoes. As they close in on a prey, they need to click faster to get quicker updates on its location. What is unclear is how fast they react to the echoes. Just before a kill, a harbour porpoise can click over 500 times a second: if they wait for the echo from one click before making the next one, they would need responses 100 times faster than human eyes.

Exploring this topic is difficult, as it requires tracking predator and prey at the same time. Vance et al. took up the challenge by building sound and movement recorders that attach to whales with suction cups. These were used on two different hunters: deep-diving beaked whales and shallow-hunting harbour porpoises. Both species adapted their click rate depending on how far they were from their prey, but their response times were similar to visual responses in monkeys and humans. This means that whales and porpoises do not act on each echo before clicking again: instead, they respond to groups of tens of clicks at a time. This suggests that their brains may be wired in much the same way as the ones of visual animals.

In the ocean, increased human activity creates a dangerous noise pollution that disrupts the delicate hunting mechanism of whales and porpoises. Better understanding how these animals find their food may therefore help conservation efforts.