The third problem is one of speed. Every echo provides a snapshot. Bats fly so quickly that they must update those snapshots regularly to detect fast-approaching obstacles or fast-escaping prey. John Ratcliffe showed that they do so with vocal muscles that can contract up to 200 times a second—the fastest speeds of any mammalian muscle.[*5] Those muscles don’t always contract so quickly. But in the final moments of a hunt, when bats are bearing down upon their targets and need to sense every dodge and dive, they produce as many pulses as their superfast muscles will allow. This is the
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