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Sunday, November 16, 2014

When foraging gets rough - bats jam each others echolocation calls

A new study on Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasilensis) published this month reveals that bats are not always kind to each other when it comes to foraging behaviors.  These bats that use echolocation to forage for food are deploying strategies to prevent other individuals from successfully finding food.  How these bats are doing this has been compared to the jamming technology of a military aircraft. 
Not always nice - individual Mexican free-tailed bat may impede others of the same species from being able to find food using echolocation by 'jamming' their echolocation calls.

The interference that these bats create is called jamming and researchers Aaron Corocoran and William Conner from Wake Forest University have found that individuals will jam the call of others during competition for their nightly hunt for food (namely insects).

Read more (here).
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1 comment:

  1. Scott H.May 1, 2015 at 7:12 PM

    A little late to the party, but this is super cool. I was aware that some insects were capable of jamming echolocation but I had never imagined that bats would jam competing bats. Has this been observed in any other species of bats? I can only find articles involving the same species you mentioned.

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