This Doesn’t Sound Tasty - Issue 42: Fakes
▻http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/this-doesnt-sound-tasty
Most people don’t go fishing at night—but most people aren’t fishing for bats. Jesse Barber and his colleagues are, in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. Barber studies how bats and the moths they eat interact with each other. He’s discovered that some moths have a cunning trick to avoid would-be diners: They copy the sounds of other moths that bats don’t find tasty. It’s an interesting twist on a phenomenon reported in 1861 by naturalist Henry Walter Bates. Bates was studying butterflies in the Amazon when he noticed it was surprisingly difficult to identify species based on sight. Individual butterflies would sport similar wing markings, but on closer examination would show distinctive traits of another type of butterfly, like a hairy fringe on the wing. In the first example of what (...)