The hairlike scales that cover the bodies of some moths act as an acoustic cloaking device, protecting the moths where they are most vulnerable to attack by bats.

The moths that bats chase, for their part, have evolved a broad array of biological tricks to avoid becoming treats for the bats.įrom warning cries and jamming bat signals to creating false targets and sound-absorbing cloaking devices, here are some of the ways that moths have fought back through the 65-million-year arms race between them and their furry, flying predators. “They experience the world in such a different way than we do,” says evolutionary biologist Juliette Rubin, a Ph.D.

In the decades since, researchers have amassed myriad more details about the echoic understanding bats have of their environment, and how they use echolocation not only to navigate but also to hunt. His groundbreaking experiments - setting obstacle courses for bats and monitoring the creatures while they flew - revealed what some scientists of the time could scarcely believe: Bats navigate the world by emitting sounds at far higher frequencies than people can hear, and map their environment through the bounce-back of sound. Since the 1940s, scientists have known that bats navigate obstacles through echolocation - a term coined by animal behavior researcher Donald Griffin, whose early studies with neuroscientist Robert Galambos took advantage of a new device that allowed eavesdropping on sounds above the human hearing range. For months, the battle is to avoid being eaten. For insectivorous bats, it’s a battle to eat. But our limited senses make it easy to miss a real nocturnal drama taking place above our heads: a battle between bats and moths. Darkness evokes fear of hidden dangers and of menacing, supernatural forces.

Half wing moth