Authors: Ryo Nakano Takuma Takanashi Annemarie Surlykke
Publish Date: 2014/09/27
Volume: 201, Issue: 1, Pages: 111-121
Abstract
Active echolocation enables bats to orient and hunt the night sky for insects As a countermeasure against the severe predation pressure many nocturnal insects have evolved ears sensitive to ultrasonic bat calls In moths batdetection was the principal purpose of hearing as evidenced by comparable hearing physiology with best sensitivity in the bat echolocation range 20–60 kHz across moths in spite of diverse ear morphology Some eared moths subsequently developed soundproducing organs to warn/startle/jam attacking bats and/or to communicate intraspecifically with sound Not only the sounds for interaction with bats but also mating signals are within the frequency range where bats echolocate indicating that sound communication developed after hearing by “sensory exploitation” Recent findings on moth sound communication reveal that closerange ~ a few cm communication with lowintensity ultrasounds “whispered” by males during courtship is not uncommon contrary to the general notion of moths predominantly being silent Sexual sound communication in moths may apply to many eared moths perhaps even a majority The low intensities and high frequencies explain that this was overlooked revealing a bias towards what humans can sense when studying acoustic communication in animals
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