Narrow Acoustic Field of View Drives Frequency Scaling in Toothed Whale Biosonar (Current Biology)

Jensen et al. analyze scaling of echolocation parameters in toothed whales. They show that large species use lower frequency and higher source levels for longer prey detection range. In contrast, species have converged on remarkably similar beamwidth, suggesting that a narrow field of view drives inverse frequency scaling in cetacean biosonar.