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Owls on
Campus
he University of Oregon hosts a number of
traditional campus critters — crows,
squirrels and freshmen, to name a few.
But hidden away in neuroscientist Terry
Takahashi’s lab is a parliament of 10 barn
owls that helps Takahashi and his team of researchers
understand the complexity of hearing in both birds and
mammals. The owls have even led the scientist’s team to
discoveries that could improve the lives of human beings.
“They’re really good at figuring out where sounds are
coming from,” says Takahashi, a professor in the UO’s
biology department and co-director of the UO’s Institute of
Neuroscience. “They’re good enough that you can put
them in a completely dark environment — like a moonless
night, for example — and they can use their sense of
hearing to capture prey.”
Barn owls don’t use echolocation like bats or porpoises.
Instead, Takahashi explains, owls use time to locate where
a noise is coming from. Imagine a sound wave traveling
toward an owl’s head, Takahashi says, with the sound first
hitting the owl’s left ear and then traveling over the owl’s
T
Los Hermanos Arango
Cuban family-band
Los Hermanos Arango
brings a rich tradition
of Afro-Cuban folklore
and funkified jazz with
piano and guitar, batás
drums, and horns to
campus for the first
installment of the
2016-17 World Music
Series.
$12 general admission, $8 students and seniors
Tickets available at the door or at the UO Ticket Office, 541-346-4363
Friday, October 21 at 7:30pm
Beall Concert Hall
961 East 18th Avenue, Eugene, OR
18
October 13, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com
By Amy Klarup
head to hit its right ear. Owls’ brains can use that time
difference to calculate where a noise is coming from.
“Their brains have been engineered through evolution
to be incredibly sensitive to these time differences,”
Takahashi says.
People can do this, too, but owls are just as good at it,
even though they have less surface area to work with.
Barn owls also have asymmetrical heads, with the right
ear pointing upward and the left ear pointing down.
Takahashi says this configuration helps the owl determine
where a sound is coming from — if the noise is louder in
its right ear, it knows the sound is coming from above.
The barn owls at the UO, which live on campus and
have been captive bred there since at least 1989, participate
in behavioral experiments wearing owl-sized ear buds that
play a variety of recorded sounds. Researchers observe
how the owls respond to the noise and measure the
accuracy of their head turn as they react. They also
monitor brain activity with electrodes.
Ultimately, Takahashi’s team seeks to better understand
what’s happening in an owl’s brain when it locates noise
University of Oregon Presents
The Oregon Humanities Center
Endowment for Public Outreach
in the Arts, Sciences, and the
Humanities.
UO LAB STUDIES
BIRDS OF PREY
AND HOW
THEY HEAR
Center for Latino/a and
Latin American Studies
ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH DECKER
2016
sources. In the meantime, Takahashi’s lab has discovered a
new method for testing hearing in babies — human babies,
that is.
Takahashi explains the phenomenon: “If you play a
sound to an owl or a person, and it’s a sudden sound, the
pupil dilates momentarily. It’s a really rapid reflex.”
Avinash Bala, a research associate in Takahashi’s lab,
noticed this reflex and subsequently realized that
audiologists could use this information to test for deafness
in young children who can’t yet verbally confirm when
they hear or don’t hear a noise. Though still in development,
the idea could lead to a smoother, easier hearing test.
“I think that’s why you do basic research,” Takahashi
says. “That’s why you study fish that live in muddy
puddles in India, or owls or bats. You never know where
the next application is going to come from.”