Bats jamming bats: Food competition through sonar interference

Abstract

Competing bats jam one another's signal Animals that live in large social colonies may benefit from many aspects of group living, but also have to contend with many of the downsides of living and foraging, with countless neighbors. Corcoran and Conner show that Mexican free-tailed bats, which live in colonies that can number in the hundreds of thousands, deal with this high level of competition for food by actively jamming competitors' echolocation. The interfering bats produce an ultrasonic signal just as the foraging bat produces its feeding call, effectively jamming the echolocation signal and causing the forager to miss its target. Science , this issue p. 745