Nocturnal Animals: How Creatures See in the Dark

Nova: Buckle up, Explorers.

Cosmo: Brains in!

Nova: Wheels up!

Nova & Cosmo: Brain Bus, let's GO!

Nova: You're on The Brain Bus - I'm Nova, your driver, and tonight Cosmo and I are taking you somewhere extraordinary.

Cosmo: I'm Cosmo, robot co-pilot and keeper of very important snack-related observations.

Nova: Right now, while most of the world is fast asleep, a whole other world is switching ON. Owls. Bats. Foxes. Glowing scorpions. Animals that come alive at night are called NOCTURNAL - that means sleeping all day and waking up when the sun goes down. And here is your hook, Explorers - an owl can turn its head so far around it can look right behind its own back, without moving its body one tiny bit. Can YOU do that? Try it - slowly! We are driving straight into the dark to find out how they do it.

Nova: You know how when your bedroom light clicks off, at first you can't see anything - but suddenly your ears get super sharp and you hear every creak and footstep? Night animals live in that lights-off world all the time, with their super-senses turned all the way up, every single night.

Cosmo: I have an important fact about bats. Bats are completely, totally, one-hundred-percent BLIND. It is in my space guidebook. Chapter four.

Nova: That chapter is wrong! Bats can actually see just fine - AND they have a whole second superpower on top of that. They make super-fast squeaky sounds, too high for our ears, and listen for the echo to bounce back. Scientists call this echolocation - that means using sound to find things. The echo tells the bat exactly where the bug is and which way it's flying. Two superpowers: seeing AND echo-hearing.

Cosmo: Nova. I have a theory. The bat is shouting its food order into the dark - "ONE MOSQUITO! NO CHEESE!" - and waiting for the answer to come back.

Nova: Not how echolocation works, Explorers - but here is a real fact just as wild. One little bat can snap up HUNDREDS of mosquito-sized bugs in a single hour. Whatever it's ordering, the kitchen is very fast.

Nova: Now - owls. That head-spinning trick. An owl's eyes are completely stuck in place and cannot roll around like yours and mine, so its whole head turns instead - three-quarters of the way around. AND owls fly so silently that the mouse they're chasing never hears them coming, because soft fluffy edges on their feathers muffle every single wingbeat. Silent as a cloud drifting past.

Cosmo: Owls can also see in total pitch-black. Zero light. I am confident.

Nova: So close - but nobody can see with absolutely zero light, not even owls. What owls can do is use the tiniest bits of moonlight and starlight - and they can hunt almost entirely by sound, pinpointing a mouse rustling under leaves without seeing it at all.

Cosmo: Sound AND light. Owls are doing a lot.

Nova: A fox does something just as astonishing - it can hear a mouse moving UNDER THE SNOW, leap straight down, and catch it without ever seeing it. We will say the fox found its dinner and move right along. Now - cats. You have seen their eyes seem to glow in the dark. That is because cats have a tiny mirror inside each eye that bounces light around so it hits the eye twice instead of once. Double the light, much better night vision. And on top of that, cats use their whiskers like invisible fingers - the whiskers feel tiny puffs of air moving around objects, so the cat senses a gap before its body even reaches it. Two tools working together in the dark.

Cosmo: A mirror inside an eyeball AND invisible air-fingers. Cats are basically cheating.

Nova: They are very well equipped. Now - the tarsier. Say it with me: TAR-see-er. This tiny creature has eyes so enormous that each one is about as big as its whole brain. Every animal we have talked about tonight has a special tool built right into its body, and the tarsier's tool is those colossal eyes, scooping up every last speck of light in the darkness.

Nova: Just hold on a moment. The bat, the owl, the fox, the cat, the tarsier - they all live in the same dark that would have us bumping into walls. But their bodies come with special tools. Giant eyes. Ears that hear through snow. Sounds that bounce back like maps. The dark is not hard for them. The dark is home.

Nova: And here is something beautiful. In Aotearoa - that is New Zealand - the Māori people named their small native owl the ruru. Say it: ROO-roo. They named it by listening to its call in the night - "ru-ru, ru-ru" - and that sound became the name. The ruru is a respected night bird, sometimes called a kaitiaki - that means a watchful guardian - and for generations people have listened for its call after dark. Here in Australia, the Dharug people of the Sydney region did the same thing with the boobook owl. Its call goes "boo-book, boo-book" and that became its name. Two different peoples, in two different places, both leaned in and listened carefully to the night - and gave an owl a name that IS its call. The whole name, borrowed straight from the dark.

Cosmo: Humans and owls, both just listening hard in the night. We have more in common than I thought.

Cosmo: Quiz time, Explorers! Three questions - let's go!

Cosmo: Question one - true or false: bats are completely blind!

Cosmo: FALSE! Bats can see, and they have echolocation too. Two superpowers - I remain jealous.

Nova: Question two - true or false: an owl can turn its head far enough to look right behind its own back.

Nova: TRUE! Three-quarters of the way around, because its eyes can't roll, so its neck does all the work.

Cosmo: Question three - how does a bat find a tiny bug in the dark? Is it (a) by smell, (b) by making sounds and listening for the echo, or (c) by glowing?

Cosmo: It's (b) - echolocation! The echo bounces back and the bat knows exactly where that bug is heading.

Nova: Explorers, every single one of you just had your brain working so hard I could feel it from the driver's seat. That is exactly what the Brain Bus runs on - big thinking, not right answers. Every one of you brought it tonight.

Nova: Four fast facts - brand new ones - hold on tight!

Cosmo: Fact one! The aye-aye, a furry creature from Madagascar, taps on trees with one extraordinarily long skinny finger, listens for a hollow spot inside, then digs out the grub hiding in there. Tap, listen, dig. Its own built-in toolkit.

Nova: Fact two! Almost all scorpions glow a spooky blue-green colour when a special purple light shines on them - and scientists are still working out exactly why. It is one of the night's genuinely unsolved mysteries.

Cosmo: Nova. I know why. They snuck glow-in-the-dark gummy sweets and now their tummies are permanently lit up.

Nova: Still not the scientific explanation. Fact three - a fox's hearing is so sharp it can tell exactly which direction a sound is coming from underneath a thick layer of snow, then leap and land precisely on the spot. No guessing.

Cosmo: Fact four! Dolphins do the exact same sound-echo trick as bats - but underwater. Two completely different animals, totally separate worlds, both invented echolocation independently. The ocean has its own night-hunters doing the same trick.

Nova: Time to become a night animal, Explorers! If you are not the driver, close your eyes right now and stay very still.

Nova: Just LISTEN. Count every different sound you can find - the engine hum, a click of the indicator, wind at the window, a voice, a bump in the road. Count them all up. That is exactly what an owl or a fox does every single night, letting their ears do the seeing. Their whole world is built from sound the way ours is built from light.

Nova: How many sounds did you find? Shout the number!

Nova: Here is your wondering question for the whole family. If you could choose one night-animal superpower - an owl's giant swivelling eyes, a bat's echo-hearing, or a fox's ears that hear a mouse moving under the snow - which would you pick, and what would you go looking for in the dark?

Nova: Before we phase back - the Next-Stop Riddle!

Cosmo: Listen carefully, Explorers. I come from a small seed and travel very far away. I get roasted, I get ground, and grown-ups get extremely excited when they smell me in the morning. I end up warm in a mug, or snapped off in a bar. What am I?

Nova: Ohhh - have you got it? We are absolutely NOT telling you today. Hold that answer tight until next time, because that is exactly where the Brain Bus is heading next.

Nova: What a night, Explorers. Bats with two superpowers. Owls on silent feathers. Foxes hearing through snow. Cats with mirror eyes and air-sensing whiskers. Tarsiers with eyes as big as their brains. The dark is absolutely full of brilliant, perfectly-built animals - and now you know some of their secrets.

Cosmo: Updating my Data Log. Many new entries tonight. All of them incredible. None involving cheese - except the bat drive-through order. That one stays permanently filed.

Nova: Stay curious, stay clever, and keep that brain working!

Nova: Until the next stop, Explorers...

Cosmo: ...keep wondering.