Study
Tiger moth jams bat sonar
Corcoran, Aaron J.; Barber, Jesse R.; Conner, William E.
Science, 2009
Big brown bats naive to the moth were flown against tiger moths that were either able to click or silenced, with encounters recorded acoustically and on high-speed video across successive nights.
- Studied in
- Bertholdia trigona, Eptesicus fuscus
- Sample size
- staged bat–moth encounters recorded on high-speed video
Bats captured silenced moths readily but failed repeatedly against clicking moths, and — critically — did not learn to overcome the clicks with experience, a pattern consistent with interference with echo processing rather than with a warning signal or a startle.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
The moth’s ultrasonic clicks jam bat echolocation, the first demonstration of sonar jamming in nature.
How NatureHQ reads it
The experimental logic is the interesting part. Clicks could be a warning that the moth tastes bad, a startle, or genuine interference, and these predict different things over repeated encounters: a warning is learned, a startle habituates, and jamming keeps working. The bats never adapted, which is what distinguishes the three. It is one of the clearest cases in behavioural ecology of a hypothesis being chosen by the shape of a learning curve.
- One moth species and one bat species, in a flight room.
- Whether jamming is common among the many clicking tiger moths, or rare, is unresolved.
- Laboratory bats may attend to clicks differently from wild bats with prior exposure.
The moth that bats never learned to catch
A tiger moth clicks when a bat attacks. Is it warning that it tastes bad, startling the bat, or interfering with the sonar itself?
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: American Association for the Advancement of SciencePublished in Science or Science Advances (AAAS).
doi.org/10.1126/science.1174096
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-09.