This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher in D'Alga. Got a minute?

Many bats hunt at night and use echolocation or sonar to zero in on their prey.

That's slowed down 20 times so you can hear it.

But some insects like the tiger moth have figured out how to evade that

echolocation by jamming it. It makes these ultrasonic clicks in the last

moment before it would normally be captured by a bat.

And this interferes with the bat that location

causing that bat to miss.

Aaron Corcoran, a postdoc at Wake Forest University.

Corcoran studied that phenomenon and says he's now discovered that the jamming strategy

isn't limited to prey.

Bats do it too, to foil each other's hunting efforts.

Corcoran and his colleagues recorded Mexican-fretailed bats,

to Darada Brasiliensis, eco-locating in the wild.

And they happened to pick up a sound bats made only when other bats were hunting.

It reminded them of the moth jamming call. So they played back that sound to bats hunting tethered

moths in a field experiment. And sure enough, bats who heard the bat jamming call

while eco-locating

were 70% less successful at capturing the tethered moth

than bats who heard a generic tone,

or no sound at all. The studies in the journal Science. Of course if you have a

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