In dark skies around the world there unfolds a nightly battle between bats and the nocturnal insects upon which they feast. You would have ...
In dark skies around the world there unfolds a nightly battle between bats and the nocturnal insects upon which they feast. You would have thought bats, equipped as they are with echolocation, in which they navigate using sound, would have no trouble gobbling up the apparently clueless insects you see banging against your windows after dusk.
But bats evolved their ultrasonic sensitivity 65 million years ago. That is more than enough time for natural selection to kick in on the behalf of insects, leading to a host of evolutionary defences that are particularly prevalent and diverse among moths.
Bats have responded to these adaptations in what has become a co-evolutionary arms race between predator and prey. Some have shifted the frequency of their calls to parts of the spectrum that a moth is not sensitive to. Others have decreased the amplitude of their calls – essentially “whispering” as they hunt so as to not alert the moth of an impending attack.
Our recent research has shed light on a particularly unusual technique that silk moths have evolved to come away unscathed from a bat attack: the use of acoustic decoys. Deployed on their wingtips, these throw bats off the scent – or rather the sound – of moths’ bodies, helping them...
