Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.
[CLIP: Audio of bat calls]
Hopkin: Bats use echolocation to hunt for their foods, and moths are frequently on the menu. But in the acoustic arms race involving predator and prey, moths also have a trick or two up their sleeve—or, essentially, on their wings, since a new analyze exhibits that moth wings are coated with scales that absorb audio, especially the ultrasonic range chosen by bats.
Thomas Neil: So moth and butterfly wings are protected in levels of scales. These are built of a in a natural way happening polymer termed chitin, which is a polymer you come across in most insect and crustacean exoskeletons.
Hopkin: Which is Thomas Neil of the College of Bristol. He started out out by bombarding bits of moth wings with seem and observing what bounced again.
Neil: We found that moth scales actually resonate in response to getting hit with ultrasound. And they resonate at frequencies that really much flawlessly match the frequencies that bats use for echolocation.
Hopkin: That vibration converts seem strength to mechanical electrical power, which muffles the echo that receives back again to the bats.
Neil: That possibly hasn’t took place by accident, that these scales are such a condition and sizing that they’re resonating at just the proper frequencies that they can take up seem energy from searching bats.
Hopkin: Up coming, Neil and his colleagues modeled the audio-dampening abilities of an array of distinctive scales.
Neil: The seriously cool factor about moths is their scales are all different designs and sizes. So what we uncovered is that each personal scale will resonate at a bit unique frequencies—and that, collectively, they truly absorb a actually broadband assortment of frequencies.
Hopkin: That assortment handles the frequencies of bat echolocation calls—findings Neil presented at the Meeting of the Acoustical Modern society of America.
Neil: So it means that the moths really should be rather perfectly safeguarded from a entire host of bats that they could interact with out in the wild.
Hopkin: But does the approach in fact perform?
Neil: So we really don’t really know how efficient these scales are at protecting moths in the serious world. But from all the things we can model and measure and predict, it looks like they would have very a substantial edge in seeking to cover these moths from bats looking at night time.
Hopkin: For any bats that might be listening, Neil says there is not much you can do to thwart this moth maneuver.
Neil: The only authentic thing that they could do would be to contact at increased amplitudes, so to improve the energy of their personal echolocation phone calls such that the echo they got from a moth would be stronger.
Hopkin: In other text, you could catch extra moths with a shout than with a whisper.
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]