Echolocating bats and toothed whales hunt and navigate by emission of sound pulses and analysis of returning echoes to form a self-generated auditory scene. Here, we demonstrate a striking functional convergence in the way these two groups of mammalsindependently evolved the capability to sense with sound in air and water.Echolocating bats and toothed whales emit sound pulses and listen for returning echoes to form an actively generated auditory scene for navigation and foraging. The independent evolution of echo-location has, along with the capabilities to fly or performlong breath-hold dives, allowed bats and toothed whales to exploit dark foraging niches with little competition from predators that rely on vision. The evolution of biosonars allowed a successful speciation to —1,100 species of bats and some 80 species of toothed whales living in a large range of different habitats and accounting for —25% of all known extant mammalian species.
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