Can Bats Jam Each Other's Sonar?

Bats use sonar to find food in the dark -- but they've got a lot of competition from other bats. Learn about echolocation and how bats go on the offensive in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, their
brain stuff Lauren Vogel bomb here. All creatures living in
the wild will try to gain an advantage when it
comes to finding their next meal. Some animals will use
their size big or small, while others rely on speed
or the ability to make a threatening sound. But the
bat has a different kind of trick up its sleeve

(00:23):
or wing signal jamming. That's are nocturnal hunting mainly in
the darkness of night. They eat prey that's tiny and quiet,
like moths and other insects, which can be difficult to
find in low light and darkness. Although the expression blind
is a bat is widely used, bats are not blind.
They just use a means of locating these tiny tidbits
of dinner other than sight. When it's time to find food,

(00:45):
bats emit a series of high pitched sounds into the
darkness that bounce back when they hit an object. When
a bat hears the echoing sound, it knows an object
is nearby, and it flies closer to the source of
the echo to send out more signals. As the echo
back sound increase as an intensity, the bat knows it's
getting closer to the prey, and it keeps up this
echolocation until it can swoop in for the kill. While

(01:08):
primarily using sonar to find food, it turns out the
bats can also use their sonar in a hostile and
competitive way. Wake Forest University researcher William Connor and his
University of Maryland colleague Aaron Corcoran used audio and video
systems to observe the behavior of Mexican freetailed bats as
they hunted for tiger moths, a favorite snack, but favorite

(01:28):
snack of the bats not the researchers. They found that
the bats emitted a specific sound that was successful in
interfering with the sonar of other prey seeking bats of
the same species. They called this process sweep jamming. The
study concludes that bats admit this sound intentionally to interfere
with the sonar of food seeking competitors. When the researchers
played back recordings of this jamming sound to other bats

(01:51):
in search of insects, those bats were also thrown off track.
The sound made the bats sent more likely to miss
their prey target. The scientists expire rented with other sounds,
like white noise, but those did not interfere with the
bats sonar. In the natural world, sonar and echolocation aren't
exclusive to bats. Mammals such as dolphins and other toothed
whales also use it to find their way, and humans

(02:13):
too have adapted technology to mimic this process. Ships regularly
use sonar to help them navigate and to explore what's
in the water under and around them. Sonar can indicate
the presence of another ship, a dangerous obstacle, or aquatic life.
In warfare, sonar can be life saving, cluing a ship
in about the presence of a hostile submarine or an
enemy torpedo. Technology can even jam the sonar of other ships,

(02:34):
just like bats. There's no evidence yet that other animals
that use echolocation for hunting employ signal jamming, but bats
seem to have perfected the process of jamming one another signals,
all in the search for a better meal. Today's episode
was written by Debbie Swanson and produced by Tristan McNeil.

(02:55):
For more on this and lots of other jam and
topics are visit our own planet how Stuff Works dot com.
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