FLICKR, USFWS, ANN FROSCHAUER
Bats produce at least 15 distinct sounds, which allow them to communicate with roost-mates and use echolocation to hunt for insects in the dark. New research shows that Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) also emit signals that can interfere with each other’s hunting. In the study, published last week (November 7) in Science, bats were up to 85.9 percent less likely to catch prey when their competitors produced jamming signals.
“Bats have solved the puzzle of sonar jamming in one of the ways that sonar and radar engineers have used—bats just found the solution 65 million years earlier,” study coauthor William Conner of Wake Forest University told Popular Mechanics.
To document the bats’ jamming behavior, Conner and his colleague Aaron Corcoran used infrared cameras and ...
