Author: Matthew Taub / Source: Atlas Obscura
For hungry bats, maybe it’s not all about how the moths actually taste. When you hunt by echolocation—sending out clicks and following the echoes—it helps to have prey who can’t hear you, like the many earless moths hugging our lightbulbs around the world.
New research, however, explains how these moths still manage to elude their predators without hearing: with minuscule, muffling fur that locks the clicks in and prevents them from echoing back to their hungry sonars. Thomas Neil, of the University of Bristol, calls the system “acoustic camouflage” in a forthcoming study, presented this week at a conference of the Acoustical Society of America.
To measure the fur’s sonic absorption capabilities, Neil and his team sent pulses of ultrasonic frequencies—sounds too high for human ears to hear—out to target moths through a loudspeaker. A microphone next to the speaker captured the resulting echoes and measured their strength. The team repeated this process from hundreds of angles for 10 moths…
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