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Moths Trick Bats With Sound
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by ScienceDave | May 30, 2007 at 07:59 pm
1126 views | 17 Recommendations | 4 comments
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Echolocating animals have two ears positioned slightly apart. The echoes returning to the two ears arrive at different times and at different loudness levels, depending on the position of the object generating the echoes. The time and loudness differences are used by the animals to perceive direction. With echolocation the bat or other animal can see not only where it's going but can also see how big another animal is, what kind of animal it is, and other features as well.
Moths are common prey for tropical bats, but some moths are tastier than others. Tiger moths, members of the Arctiidae family, either retain chemical deterrents and poisons from the plants they feast upon, or produce them themselves. Some of these moths also produce a high frequency sound, which the bats soon associate with their recently disturbed pallet after a spoiled meal.
But Tiger Moths have others hording in on their racket. Some rather tasty moth species (a relative statement, I’m sure) produce a similar high frequency sound, thus deterring the bats. This is an example of Batesian mimicry, where the mimic lacks the ‘noxious punch’ of the tiger moth (unlike Mullerian mimicry, where toxic species resemble each other to collectively discourage predation)
All the bats quickly learned to avoid the noxious moths first offered to them, associating the warning sounds with bad taste. They then avoided a second sound-producing species even though it was not chemically protected. This is similar to the way birds avoid butterflies that look like the bad-tasting Monarch.
Although visual mimicry has been well established, this study provides the first definitive evidence for acoustic mimicry beyond anecdotal evidence.
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Glockoma1
Seattle, Washington, United StatesLiz Fairhurst
Vancouver (Killarney), British Columbia, Canada
ScienceDave
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (4)
at 04:07 on May 31st, 2007
More top-notch science coverage! Thanks for this.
at 06:39 on May 31st, 2007
nouseforadave, excellent. The animal kingdom never ceases to amaze me-- they, too, are appearance-conscious, albeit for different reasons than their human relations.
at 12:51 on May 31st, 2007
More moths in the news today... militarized moths. Will there be an echolocation arms race? Okay, probably not, but interesting nonetheless.
at 21:50 on June 1st, 2007
nouseforadave,
Your work on NP is great stuff, thanks for posting it!
I have often observed the behavior of moths flying around street lights at night, and I have observed an interesting survival tactic. I do not know if the observed behavior is confined to a particular species of moth or not.
When moths are flying around the street lights, occasionally one or two will drop, almost in an instant, vertically toward the ground. This drop is almost always followed by a bat swooping down on the moths' previous position. The logical conclusion I have come to is that moths must be able to detect the bat's sonar and make very effective evasive maneuvers.
I am not a scientist, so I would assume that entomologists have already noted this behavior; I just thought that I would throw my two cents in since I find biology so fascinating.