A bat closes in on its prey, a tethered moth. William Conner and Aaron Corcoran of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and colleagues used the same setup to study a tiger moth called Bertholdia trigona. B. trigona "goes berserk," making a lot of noise above the range of human hearing when a hunting bat approaches, Conner notes. Bats rely on their natural sonar to locate flying moths in the dark, but in the lab, the bats rarely managed to nab one of these loud moths. When researchers disabled the moth's noisemak-ing organs, though, bats caught the moths in midair with ease and ate them, Conner reported January 5 in Boston at a meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. He says the work is "the first example of any prey item that jams biological sonar," adding that when threatened these moths emit a steady, broadband sound. Insect-hunting bats and their moth prey have become a classic in the study of evolutionary arms races, he says. "This is warfare."
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