Insect crawling betrays

Written by Dr. H. P. Bustami

Saturday, 30 August 2008

Bats can locate crawling insects (Courtesy: Dietmar Nill/Leonie Baie)

Bats are known to locate their flying prey (flies, moths, midges and other night active aliferous "six-legs") with Echolocation . Little focus has been done on crawling night active arthropods and other animals. Now it could be shown that insects crawling on the ground can be located by flying bats due to the noise their crawling causes. Spiders, carabid beetles and other ground dwelling small animals which can be suitable as bat-food produce characteristic sounds with their leg movements.

The bats are able to recognize the underground, the speed and the form of a potential prey as scienctists from the Max-Planck-Institute of Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, now described in a publication in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The biologists could show that in central europe bat species are more able to find crawling insects and spiders than in tropical environments. Tropical rain forests have a higher background noise, for example cicadas singing in the night make such enormous noise that crawling insects are less "visible" to the echolocation system of the bats living in those forests.

So life is not easy for big carabid beetles in Europe which - looking for a good meal for midnight - suddenly themselves can become part of a "night dinner".

Source:
Holger R. Goerlitz, Stefan Greif und Björn M. Siemers: Cues for acoustic detection of prey: Insect rustling sounds and the influence of walking substrate. Journal of Experimental Biology. 22. August 2008

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