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🗓️ 6 November 2014
⏱️ 2 minutes
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0:00.0 | This is scientific American 60 second science. |
0:04.4 | I'm Christopher in D'Alga. Got a minute? |
0:06.8 | Many bats hunt at night and use echolocation or sonar to zero in on their prey. |
0:13.2 | That's slowed down 20 times so you can hear it. |
0:18.8 | But some insects like the tiger moth have figured out how to evade that |
0:26.0 | echolocation by jamming it. It makes these ultrasonic clicks in the last |
0:30.6 | moment before it would normally be captured by a bat. |
0:34.0 | And this interferes with the bat that location |
0:39.0 | causing that bat to miss. |
0:41.0 | Aaron Corcoran, a postdoc at Wake Forest University. |
0:45.7 | Corcoran studied that phenomenon and says he's now discovered that the jamming strategy |
0:50.1 | isn't limited to prey. |
0:52.1 | Bats do it too, to foil each other's hunting efforts. |
0:56.2 | Corcoran and his colleagues recorded Mexican-fretailed bats, |
0:59.8 | to Darada Brasiliensis, eco-locating in the wild. |
1:03.8 | And they happened to pick up a sound bats made only when other bats were hunting. |
1:09.7 | It reminded them of the moth jamming call. So they played back that sound to bats hunting tethered |
1:16.1 | moths in a field experiment. And sure enough, bats who heard the bat jamming call |
1:21.7 | while eco-locating |
1:23.2 | were 70% less successful at capturing the tethered moth |
1:27.4 | than bats who heard a generic tone, |
1:29.4 | or no sound at all. The studies in the journal Science. Of course if you have a |
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