A Human Hunter with Sonic Powers?
As part of Fortnightly topic challenge #3: Creature Design
I am looking for a realistic way to create a particularly nasty creature.
What I would like:
- A creature that is capable of emitting a sonic 'noise'...maybe wave is a better term
- This ability should allow the creature to render higher order creatures stunned or unconscious for 30+ seconds, I would prefer the effect NOT be permanent.
- By higher order I mean vertebrates essentially, if all vertebrates creates a problem specifically it should work on humans
- Is a predator of the creatures it stuns
Questions:
- Can this be accomplished biologically?
- What would the mechanism for such a skill be (both the process and the biological i.e. physical mechanism be...an extra organ maybe?)
- How would this animal protect itself from its own abilities?
- Are there any physical limitations having this power would necessitate, for example if there is a mechanism for this could it be slotted into a bear, a monitor lizard, maybe a kangaroo?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11610. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
It's already been done.
Two species of moth, the hawkmoth and the tiger moth, use not just sonic but ultrasonic signals to defend themselves from bat attacks. The hawkmoth has only recently been discovered to do this.
How? They use their genitals. No, I'm not joking. Have a look at this video (from Scientific American) showing the effect in action - the sound isn't that clear as our hearing range only goes up to ~21kHz and ultrasonic is above that, but the middle part of the video shows the process very clearly. (Perfectly SFW but your boss might throw you some strange looks...)
There are several different papers on the subject of natural sonic defense, though they are a bit long.
The best way to defend yourself against your own weapon is to make sure it's outside of your hearing range. This is something that would very likely be evolved while the defence trait itself evolves: those who can hear it will also be stunned and then eaten when the predator comes to. Essentially, your hearing range just needs to be lower than that of your predator.
Although the moth sound doesn't work on humans, it wouldn't take much to bring its frequency down to our hearing range, where it would in fact be incredibly loud - it's loud in enough in the ultrasonic range to jam bats' echolocation radar. Once this is done it would likely work on most higher-order vertebrates: humans have some of the worst hearing ranges in the natural world.
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