Audino is designated as the “hearing pokémon”, for good reason! According to the pokédex, it cant hear faint sounds from over a mile away, and uses the feelers on its ears to sense emotions and heartbeats. How does that work?
Sound is measured in frequency, typically in units of Hertz. High-pitched sounds have high frequency, and low-pitched sounds have lower frequency. Humans can hear sounds between 20 and 20,000 Hz - but as far as the animal kingdom is concerned, humans have pretty bad hearing. There are lots of animals that can hear sounds that we can’t, just like there are animals that can see colors that we can’t. Bats, owls, dolphins, dogs, and cats are among the animals that have the best hearing in our world, but as it turns out the creature with the absolute best hearing in the world doesn’t even have ears! Let me introduce you to the Greater Wax Moth, galleria mellonella:
The Greater Wax Moth can hear sounds from 7 Hz all the way up to 300,000 Hz, higher than any other animal known! Researchers think that they evolved this ability to help evade their natural predator, the bat, who of course emits high-frequency sounds with echolocation to “see” its surroundings.
The Greater Wax Moth doesn’t have ears, but it does have a sound-detecting organ called a tympanic membrane. The moth’s tympanic membrane is located on its stomach, and it is a small (about 0.5 mm), thin barrier that is extremely sensitive to vibrations, kind of like the human’s eardrum. On a physical level, sound is simply vibrations through the air, so the more sensitive an organ is to vibrations, the better the hearing the creature has. There’s also some evidence that this moth also uses its antenna to sense vibrations, giving it another form of “hearing”. Just like Audino’s ear feelers!
In fact, several of the best listeners in the animal kingdom use more than one part of their body to detect sounds. Elephants, for example, actually use their feet! In addition to their famous large ears, elephants can “hear” with their feet. They have extremely sensitive foot pads, which allow them to feel very faint vibrations in the ground. An elephant can hear the roar of another elephant from over 5 miles away by sensing the vibrations in the ground with its feet.
This has an added benefit, too: sound travels about 4 times faster through solid objects, than it does through air. You can test this yourself by putting your ear on your desk, and softly tapping on the other end - the sound will come more clearly through the desk than it does through the air, with your head up. This is why Audino’s feelers are extremely powerful: by directly touching an object with its feelers, Audino’s sensors can detect even the faintest of vibrations.
That is how Audino can sense emotions, too! Your heart beats faster when you are scared or excited, and your breathing might slow down when you’re relaxed. All of these are sounds that your body makes that Audino can detect! Similarly, it can detect when an egg is close to hatching by feeling the vibrations of the pokémon inside the egg.
Audino has two organs for hearing, its ears and its feelers. Its feelers can pick up very faint vibrations in whatever object they touch, sensing many sounds outside the range of human ears.
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