Abbreviated Science Round-up: Moth magic tricks, Horse dentists, and a potential weight loss tool
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And now, fresh from the pages of peer-reviewed journals unmediated by the filter of popular press or people who want to drink mummy juice, here’s you’re actual ASR for the week. First up, a little battle-report from the evolutionary war between predatorAbbreviated Science Round-up: Moth magic tricks, Horse dentists, and a potential weight loss tool
And now, fresh from the pages of peer-reviewed journals unmediated by the filter of popular press or people who want to drink mummy juice, here’s you’re actual ASR for the week. First up, a little battle-report from the evolutionary war between predator and prey. Moths generate auditory-illusions to fool bats. Intent is one of those tricky things when talking about evolution. In this case, as in many others, what looks like clever planning is the result of thousands of generations of refinement — mostly made through the mediation of how individuals who didn’t play this game well got eaten. It’s not that the moths all got together somewhere and plotted this deception. It’s the bats ate the moths who were easy to catch, until you ended up with this incredible development in insect-audio. The spinning hindwing tails of silk moths (Saturniidae) divert bat attack by reflecting sonar to create a misleading echoic target. The moths create a false sonar image. These are stealth aircraft, mico-edition, refined and driven by requirements and deadlines much more strict than anything ever laid out by the Defense Department. And it’s happened more than once. Different species of moths have developed their own different hind-wing architectures, each of which does something subtly different when casting a deceptive sonic shadow. That difference between species is likely a key part of why this continues to work for any species. If every type of moth was generating the same sort of illusion, projected in some way proportionate to speed, position, and path, bats would long ago have worked out a compensating mechanism. But because different moths pull off this trick in slightly different ways, it’s a lot harder for the bats than “aim 10 inches left, and two feet above.” But that’s not the say bats have not compensated. Of course they have. That’s why there are still bats. For every time you’ve watched a antelope run across the screen with a narrator relaying how it’s life or death, remember that it’s also life or death for the cat on its heels. After all, predators have to predate. So the fight mega-generational squabble between moths and bats has also resulted in increasing sophisticated means of piercing these illusions from the Chiropteran forces. Not to mention giving these scientists an excuse for what sounds like a really, really fun experiment. To test the mechanism underlying these anti-bat traits, we pit bats against three species of silk moths with experimentally altered hindwings that created a representative gradient of ancestral and extant hindwing shapes. Okay, maybe clipping moth wings doesn’t sound like your idea of a fun Saturday evening. But they made high speed video of this aerial combat, with moths throwing illusions and bats trying to suss out reality. That’s just cool. Let’s go read more science! Read more