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Bats buzz like hornets to scare away predators

Tactic is first known example of a mammal mimicking noise made by an insect

• 9 MAY 2022
• 11:00 AM
• BYTESS JOOSSE

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The whining buzz of a wasp is enough to send many of us running for the hills. Now, it seems that one crafty species has used that aversion to its advantage. Researchers found greater mouse-eared bats mimic the buzzing sound of stinging insects like wasps, likely to scare off predators.

“This is a fascinating study,” says David Pfennig, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies animal mimicry but who was not involved with the work.

Nature is replete with examples of sneaky animals and plants imitating the traits of other organisms. The innocuous scarlet kingsnake (Lampropeltis elapsoides), for example, has adopted the red-and-black stripes of the dangerously venomous coral snake (Micrurus fulvius).

But there aren’t many noted instances of acoustic mimicry, Pfennig says, likely because they’re hard to study, not necessarily because they don’t exist. “We are a very visually oriented species, and there are a lot of sounds we can’t hear as humans.”

Danilo Russo happened upon one of these by accident. An ecologist at the University of Naples Federico II, he was conducting fieldwork in southeastern Italy more than 2 decades ago when he snagged some greater mouse-eared bats (Myotis myotis). The species is native to Europe and about the size of a house mouse. Every time Russo went to grab the animals and remove them from his nets, “they buzzed like wasps or hornets,” he says. It seemed like some sort of defense mechanism, he explains.

One of the mouse-eared bats’ biggest predators are owls, which commonly live in the tree nooks or rock crevices that wasps, hornets, and other buzzing, stinging insects hole up in. It occurred to Russo that the bats might be buzzing to mimic bees and send owls scurrying away. But it took him several years to find the right bat experts to help answer the question.