Tiger moth jams bat sonar (2009)

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1174096

by FergusArgyll • 2 years ago

44 30 2 years ago

science.org

jimnotgym• 2 years ago

Ok it jams sonar, but you don't need sonar if the target is making a noise, you just listen, don't you?

I couldn't read the full paper but the abstract didn't mention that they were going to discuss how the jamming worked

geomark• 2 years ago

I think the bats do need sonar because they use it for echo ranging. You need an echo to determine range.

icebreaking• 2 years ago

I could read the full paper and man they definitely talked about a few different noises the moths make and how effective each one is at deterring preying bats.

adrian_b• 2 years ago

Free full paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26676734_Tiger_Moth...

Besides the fact that the sonar is needed for accurate ranging, as mentioned by another poster, these moths produce their sounds in response to the bat sonar, so their sounds would not be useful to find them without sonar.

As mentioned in the paper, there are also other kinds of moths which are poisonous and which do not jam the sonar, but which emit warning sounds that the bats learn to avoid.

Other moths also emit sounds, but those sounds do not prevent bats from hunting them, except perhaps for the first few times until a bat learns that those moths emitting sounds are good to eat, so their sounds do not have a jamming effect.

exDM693• 2 years ago

Bat (and human) echolocation is not based on distinguishing sonar pings in time domain, but rather listening to the frequency spectrum of the reverberating sound, ie. "measuring" the impulse response of the surroundings.

Sending a signal that resembles the echo pulses will skew the spectrum and confuse the listener.

In theory that information can be used to triangulate the "jammer" if you could measure the small difference in time from receiving in left vs. right ear but that's not how mammal brains process auditory signals.

So it's not like sonar in submarine warfare with hydrophone arrays and digital signal processing.

thomastjeffery2• 2 years ago

I don't know about bats, but humans most certainly do both.

resolutebat• 2 years ago

Nice garden path sentence title there: both "jams" and "bat" have several completely different meanings and it took a while until my brain permutated the right ones.

(Tiger moth) jams (bat sonar).

magnusmundus• 2 years ago

I also had some fun thinking on a tiger moth jam, and how that may have batted a sonar.

d1sxeyes2• 2 years ago

Tiger also has its own meaning, which makes the parsing even harder.

Both 'tiger moth' and 'bat sonar' are noun phrases in which the first word is not the actual meaning of the phrase. So you have two of these weird noun phrases, topped off by ambiguity about the verb ('jam' vs 'bat').

Very tricky sentence to wrap your head around!

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

Both 'tiger moth' and 'bat sonar' are noun phrases in which the first word is not the actual meaning of the phrase. So you have two of these weird noun phrases

That's not weird; it is the norm for English by a ridiculous margin. We do have some left-headed compounds ("pickpocket"), but they are very noticeable exceptions to an extremely strong rule.

losvedir• 2 years ago

Ah, garden path sentence! What a great term. I seriously had to read the title a couple times and thought initially it was an article on passphrases.

shard• 2 years ago

At first read I thought the title was a secure password example along the lines of "correct horse battery staple":

https://xkcd.com/936/

FirmwareBurner• 2 years ago

Waiting for bats to develop laser range finding capabilities.

FrustratedMonky• 2 years ago

I wonder if moths being 'soft' is also an adaptation.

Is there any study that moth 'soft' covering is also a sound absorber, to allude bats. I didn't see it mentioned here.

zimpenfish• 2 years ago

zefrank mentioned this briefly in his latest video[0] showing a paper titled "Thoracic scales of moths as a stealth coating against bat biosonar"[1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-s714RNXHY

[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.069...

pama• 2 years ago

That also makes a nice garden path passphrase: soft tiger moth scales evade bat sonar.

FergusArgyll• 2 years ago

Here's the relevant wiki page for reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echolocation_jamming

gregfjohnson• 2 years ago

There’s a fantastic book called “An Immense World” by Ed Yong that covers the incredible range of sensory modalities found in nature. One of the chapters goes into depth on bats and sonar.

pseudolus• 2 years ago

There have been a number of articles that have highlighted the ongoing evolutionary development of measures and countermeasures with respect to bats and insects over the last 60+ million years.[0] Sort of a natural landscape that mirrors the ongoing battle in military developments (radar, stealth, etc).

[0] "Sound strategies: the 65-million-year-old battle between bats and insects" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21888517/

"Moths and bats: An evolutionary war" https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/evolutionary-war-between-moth...

andsoitis• 2 years ago

it's all an arms race for increased chances to produce offspring.

Tiger moth jams bat sonar (2009)

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