Interestingly, all the owls consistently reacted to the bat and insect buzzes in a similar way, by promptly moving away from the speaker. Related: 2 lemon-yellow bat species discovered in Africa. Half of the owls had been raised in captivity, and therefore they hadn't been exposed to buzzing wasps before, and the other half grew up in the wild where they would have heard the insects. The team then recorded all these sounds and played them back to barn owls ( Tyto alba) and tawny owls ( Strix aluco) they also played a non-buzzing bat sound to the owls, as a point of comparison. In their analyses, the team took owls' hearing range into account and found that, within that range, the hornets' buzzes appeared remarkably similar to those produced by bothered bats.īarn owls flee from the sound of buzzing hornets, as well as buzzing bats. The team compared the acoustic qualities of the bats' buzzes with those of several stinging insects, including European hornets ( Vespa crabro) and Western honeybees ( Apis mellifera) and found that all the animals produced highly-repetitive, pulsed buzzes when handled by researchers. ![]() ![]() To test this hypothesis, he assembled a research group led by Leonardo Ancillotto, first author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar at UNINA and set out to take recordings from the buzzy bats. Russo suspected that the animals might be imitating wasps as a way to avoid predation. While in Lazio, a region of central Italy, he'd captured the bats in soft mesh traps, called mist nets, and "noticed that when we took the bats out of the net or handled the bats to process them, they buzzed like wasps or hornets," Russo told Live Science in an email. Russo first heard the distinctive buzz of greater mouse-eared bats while completing his doctoral degree. Similarly, the milkweed tiger moth ( Euchates egle) imitates the distinct, ultrasonic sounds produced by the dogbane tiger moth ( Cycnia tenera), a toxic species, in order to ward off hungry bats, researchers reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ![]() Imitating scarier animals is a defensive strategy seen in a variety of animals, such as an Amazonian bird called the cinereous mourner ( Laniocera hypopyrra), whose chicks visually resemble big, hairy, toxic caterpillars commonly found in the forest, according to research published in 2015 in the journal The American Naturalist. And "to my best knowledge, ours is the first documented case of acoustic mimicry in a mammal," meaning the bats emulate the sounds made by stinging insects, rather than mimicking aspects of their appearance, said Danilo Russo, senior author of the study and a professor of ecology at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (UNINA) in Portici, Italy. This is the first known example of a mammal (in this case, a bat) mimicking an insect (a stinging hornet) to gain protection from a predator (owls).
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