Thursday, May 16, 2024

Tiger beetles mimic ultrasound to warn off bats or to mimic tiger moths

Amazing stuff!

"... Tests involving feeding 94 tiger beetles to big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) swiftly disproved the hypothesis that they were warning bats off due to their toxicity. Almost all the beetles were completely consumed without issue. ...
Instead, the researchers now believe tiger beetles produce ultrasound to mimic tiger moths (subfamily Arctiinae), which are noxious to bats. Comparing recordings of the 2 groups of insects revealed a clear overlap in the ultrasound produced. ..."

From the abstract:
"Echolocating bats and their eared insect prey are in an acoustic evolutionary war. Moths produce anti-bat sounds that startle bat predators, signal noxiousness, mimic unpalatable models and jam bat sonar. Tiger beetles (Cicindelidae) also purportedly produce ultrasound in response to bat attacks. Here we tested 19 tiger beetle species from seven genera and showed that they produce anti-bat signals to playback of authentic bat echolocation. The dominant frequency of beetle sounds substantially overlaps the sonar calls of sympatric bats. As tiger beetles are known to produce defensive chemicals such as benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide, we hypothesized that tiger beetle sounds are acoustically advertising their unpalatability. We presented captive big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) with seven different tiger beetle species and found that 90 out of 94 beetles were completely consumed, indicating that these tiger beetle species are not aposematically signalling. Instead, we show that the primary temporal and spectral characteristics of beetle warning sounds overlap with sympatric unpalatable tiger moth (Arctinae) sounds and that tiger beetles are probably Batesian mimics of noxious moth models. We predict that many insect taxa produce anti-bat sounds and that the acoustic mimicry rings of the night sky are hyperdiverse."

Tiger beetles mimic ultrasound to warn off bats

Tiger beetles produce anti-bat ultrasound and are probable Batesian moth mimics (open access)


Fig. 1 Tiger beetles produce anti-bat ultrasound. 


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