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About 12,000 species of tiger moth exist on earth.

Some of them swoop and dive out of harm's way

when a hungry bat tries to make them a meal.

But other tiger moth species are more blasey. They just don't bother to flee from the hungry bats.

And I really just wanted to know why, why the difference. What factors might be influencing

whether a species is more or less likely to perform these evasive

maneuvers.

Wake Forest University behavioral ecologist Nick Dowdy.

He says it's a matter of taste. Some of the moths are delicious, but others are toxic and

taste terrible. When the airborne predators catch these unappetizing moths, they'll spit them out,

giving the insects a new lease on life.

In a field experiment, Dowdy and his colleague William Connor filmed how five different species

of tiger moths responded to bat attacks.

And what we found was that those species which were really toxic,

so when the bats captured them, they almost never ate them.

Those species were much more likely to be what we call nonchalant,

species that do not perform evasive maneuvers very often.

On the other hand, species that were really palatable were much more likely to perform those evasive maneuvers, almost in a sense sort of hedging their bets.

Because if they don't make that escape, if they are captured by a bat, those species are more likely to be eaten.

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