When catching bats with mistnets sometimes I had headache, and felt the pulses of ultrasounds of bats screaming as pain. What about more sensitive bat predators?
As Wikipedia says: "Sonic and ultrasonic weapons (USW) are weapons of various types that use sound to injure, incapacitate, or kill an opponent. Some sonic weapons are currently in limited use or in research and development by military and police forces." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_weapon
What about ultrasonic weapons in nature?
Dilian:
I am not too sure about the use of ultrasound weapons by Bats, but the link furnished herewith might offer some useful insights:
http://www.sonarjamming.com/Conner_Corcoran2012AnnRevEntomol.pdf
Best
Syed
Hello, Dilian,
There was a paper published in Science in late 2014 about Mexican free-tailed bats using their sonar to "jam" the sonar of competing bats during feeding activity. See:
"Bats jamming bats: Food competition through sonar interference," by A.J. Corcoran et al. Science, 2014. www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1259512
You can find summaries of the paper by Corcoran & Conner at:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141106143721.htm , and
http://phys.org/news/2014-11-hungry-prey-sonar.html
Not use of sonar against predators, mind you. Still, a novel use of their ultrasonic abilities during resource competition!
Cheers,
Ian
Dear Georgiev
I know ultrasound has very limited power to the mammals, because of their habituateness. Bats would use for feeding but for against for predators.
Muroyama
Hi Dilain,
It seems unlikely to me that flying bats would use ultrasonic vocalisations to deter predators. This is because in these cases the most likely predators would be birds of prey, which would also be flying, either in pursuit of the bat or stooping down at high speed from above. In either case, if the bat was lucky enough to detect the predator before it struck, any ultrasound it emitted would be directed away from the predator, as the bat would be fleeing.
Bats that have been caught often give ultrasonic distress calls, and the playback work of Jon Russ (available on ResearchGate) and others has shown that these calls attract conspecifics, perhaps to elicit a mobbing response, like those shown by many bird species. However, I don't know of any work that shows that predators are deterred by distress calls of bats.
Many forest bats (e.g. Plecotus, Murina, Nyctophilus) that typically produce low intensity echolocation calls also give a variety of very loud "social" calls. For most species very little is known about the function of these calls, and particularly those that are given by bats flying in the forest. This is because the individuals giving the calls and any behaviours associated with them are very difficult to observe in the field, and what we know mostly comes from monitoring the responses of bats in playback experiments. It may be that some of these calls are used to repel potential predators and it might be interesting to do some playback experiments to test this.
Dear Dillan,
Thanks for your question. I think that it is very unlikely that bats use ultrasound to defend themselves from predators. Use of ultrasound by insects to jam the sonar of bats is effective because bats are auditory hunters. All the predators of bats are highly unlikely to be able to hear ultrasound e.g. birds. As David Hill mentions, there may be some conspecific communication through ultrasound resulting in mobbing, but not a direct predator-prey action-reaction. I don't know of any studies or evidence of bats using ultrasound as an aposematic signal and none are toxic or distasteful to eat (so I am told).
Regards,
Stuart
Hi Dilian,
Very good point that Stuart Parsons makes - birds can't hear ultrasound! But I was wondering about mammalian predators of forest bats. Some carnivores can certainly hear ultrasound (cf ultrasonic cat and dog repellers). I think it unlikely that bats would emit specific calls to repel them, but not impossible...
Best wishes,
David
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