Read the article here.Moths are the tasty treat of choice for bats. Usually, there is not much a moth can do to avoid becoming a bat's meal, but there is one moth, the Bertholdia trigona, a species of tiger moth, that has evolved an ingenious strategy to stay alive after being targeted: jam the bat's sonar.
A bat uses his sonar system to locate and catch prey. This tiger moth, however, has found a way to make this system useless. When a moth feels the sonar of a bat, it responds with a series of high-frequency, fast clicks from a pair of structures called "tymbals". This disrupts the bat's echolocation cycle. It unknown exactly how this jamming works. It is hypothesized that the clicks either mask the echoes or blur the acoustic image to hide its exact location. The Bertholdia trigona is the only known species that can disrupt sonar.
This discovery was made using a man-made "bat cave" in which scientists could observe and monitor bat and moth interactions using infrared cameras and by recording high-frequency sounds. The bats and moths were allowed to fly free and interact as they would in nature. The head researcher, William Connor, and his assistant, Aaron Corcoran, say that this is a whole new development in the arms race between prey and predator.
The next step is to observe this behavior in nature. Connor and Corcoran plan on bringing this study to the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona, where one in three moths is this species of sonar-jamming tiger moth and there is no shortage of hungry bats. They will be studying if evasive maneuvering is also part of this moth's evasion techniques.
-Tricia Carlson (week 7)
Wow Tricia, great find for your article! That's so interesting how they were able to discover that. It would be interesting to find if some bats evolved ways to get around their sonar-jamming. Have they found this behavior in other moths? It would be interesting to see this behavior in the wild and the variations of it.
ReplyDeletePosted by Christine Rega
This is interesting. Did the article mention what the bats' responses were to their sonar being jammed? It would be interesting to see if the moths re-directed the bats of if their sonar jamming was just to make themselves invisible to the bats.
ReplyDeleteSara Ku
Wow this is impressive. I had no idea that any moths could do this. Did they say how well it worked? Were all of the moths able to avoid being eaten? I wonder how the bat is going to respond to the moths. It would be interesting to see how they evolve a way around this.
ReplyDelete-Tara Quist
This is really neat! Do you know anything else about the man-made bat cave? Was it made just for this? How did they originally see this? Do you think the bats will ever find a way to munch on them despite this new tactic? Nice find!
ReplyDelete-Alyson Paige