The Amazing Ways Animals Hear Our World

Since the beginning of time, humans have shared the world with other species. Each one has a unique perception of reality in terms of color, speed, and sound. Thanks to technology, we can now understand how our world sounds to animals. So, how about we try living with their ears for a bit?

Let's start with man's best friend, dogs. It is known that dogs experience time differently than we do. The best guess is that one human year equals seven dog years. But when you call out their names, what exactly do they hear? Dogs experience our world slower than humans. This works for their perception of time and sound.

Let's say you're calling Skipper to go for a walk. You're speaking at a normal pace, but to Skipper, he's hearing you in slow motion, as if you pressed the 0.75 speed on your Spotify app. Dogs have a wider hearing range than humans and can hear sounds from a very great distance. An average human has a hearing range from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, while dogs can hear up to 45 kHz. Some dog breeds are good hunters and need better hearing equipment.

However, dogs aren't as good as humans at distinguishing sounds. Humans can easily differentiate between "slow" and "go," while dogs struggle with this. This is called frequency selectivity. Different parts of the cochlea respond to different frequencies.

This is what a human ear looks like on the inside, and this is what a dog's ear looks like. The cochlea is a part that looks like a snail shell and is filled with saltwater-like fluid. Tiny hairs inside the cochlea vibrate according to the sound frequency. Some hairs are activated by high-pitched sounds, while others respond to lower notes.

Dogs prove to be humans' best friends as they also lose their hearing with old age. Human hearing is at its prime when we're young. A study from the University of New South Wales says that a child can hear up to 24 kHz. This decreases as we get older, and the maximum hearing capacity of an older person can go as low as 8 kHz. Both in dogs and humans, the loss of hearing is due to the loss of tiny hairs in the cochlea.

And what about cats? Cats can hear higher frequencies than dogs, up to a little beyond 60 kHz. This is especially important since they hunt small rodents that make almost imperceptible noises to our human ears. A cat can pick up on a mouse hiding in a bush over 100 feet away.

While dogs experience reality in slower motion than humans, cats actually experience life about 9% faster than we do. You've probably heard that sound can be classified as either infrasound or ultrasound. For example, the sound of tectonic plates moving around is infrasound. Infrasounds are low-range frequencies, anything below 20 Hz, which means we can't hear them, but an elephant can.

Elephants have enormous ears that allow them to pick up on sound waves much longer than those we can detect. This means they can hear the movement of clouds and rain clouds gathering. This helps them know when it's time to head to water reservoirs. Elephants also use infrasound to communicate with each other by pounding their feet on the ground, setting up powerful but hardly audible vibrations. They pick up the vibrations through nerve endings in their feet and ear bones.

Speaking of vibrations, how do you think a snake can be enchanted by a flute if it doesn't have ears? Snakes follow the man's imperceptible foot tapping on the ground. For humans, sound waves are usually carried by air, but snakes are connected to the environment by vibration. Snakes don't have eardrums, so their inner ear is connected to their jaw. The vibrations move from bone to bone inside a snake, allowing them to "listen with their bones."

Humans listen through the air, while elephants and snakes can hear through the ground. How does hearing work for water animals? You might think water impairs hearing, but not for dolphins. Dolphins emit high-frequency sound waves classified as ultrasound. They emit clicking sounds to scan the water for food and other animals. The way the sound bounces back helps them identify what's in the water ahead and around them. Dolphins see with their ears, a form of navigation called echolocation.

Sonar, an instrument used by ships to search for things underwater, works similarly. Sonar emits fast sound pulses that bounce off the seafloor and back, detecting water depth, shipwrecks, and geological formations. Dolphins use this technique to locate themselves underwater.

Humans can hear frequencies up to 100 kHz when diving underwater, almost like dolphins. This might be due to how sound travels differently through water or how our ears receive sound underwater and our brains interpret it.

Now, it's not only dolphins that use sound to navigate. Bats also do this. Bats live in dark environments and can't rely on their vision. They have such advanced hearing equipment that they don't need to watch where they are going. Even though a bat's brain is tiny, it can map the entire environment and locate prey easily.

Rodents, like mice and chipmunks, also have fascinating hearing abilities. Compared to humans, a chipmunk experiences reality at half the speed we do. What looks super fast and clumsy to us is chill from the rodent's point of view. A mouse's hearing can go as high as 91 kHz, which is very high.