This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science.

I'm Karen Hawking.

Birds of a feather flock together, and soda bats and fishes and any little critter hoping

that getting lost in the crowd will keep them off the evening menu.

But predators got to eat.

So they in turn have come up with clever ways to cut through the visual clutter of a turning

mass of panic prey to hone in on their target.

For hawks who forage in massive swarms of bats, the trick it seems is to just dive in and

grab whatever hapless flyer happens to share your trajectory.

That's according to a study in the journal, Nature Communications.

Intercepting even a single maneuvering target is a challenging task in itself.

Graham Taylor is a professor of mathematical biology at the University of Oxford.

He got to wondering how predators like hawks and falcons manage to isolate an intercept

and moving target when it's part of a flock or a swarm, a dense aggregation that seems

like it would offer optimal protection for the prey.

For one thing, it can reduce your individual risk of coming under attack in the first

place, and it might also make it harder for a predator to catch you if it initiates an attack

at all.

That's thanks to the so-called confusion effect.

Which is the idea that the presence of multiple similar targets makes it harder for a predator

to single out and track any one individual.

But are swarms as confusing to a hawk as they might seem to you or me?

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