Mary's Monday Metazoan: Can't we all get along?

This is devious: Mexican free-tailed bats have jamming sonar to disrupt competitor bats' food hunting. It's like there aren't enough insects for everyone to eat!

nickolayhristov

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By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Got bugs? Get a bat. As many species of bats are insectivores, they help keep insect populations in check. Hurricane…
Bats view the world in echoes, timing the reflections of their own ultrasonic calls to navigate and hunt. This biological sonar, or echolocation, has made them masters of the night sky; it's so sensitive that some species take moths and other insects on the wing, while others pluck spiders from…
Tanja was lucky last night. She and her husband were filming bats out in Arizona. At one moment she picked up her cheap camera and aimed it at the sky at just the right moment to catch this picture of a kestrel (Falco sparverius) catching a Mexican Free-tailed Bat (Tadarida brasiliensis) - due to…