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Moths use “acoustic camouflage” to evade bats

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Madagascar bullseye moth/Thomas Neil

Their fuzz works like an acoustic panel to cut down the noise volume from their movements. From ScienceDaily:

While some moths have evolved ears that detect the ultrasonic calls of bats, many types of moths remain deaf. In those moths, Neil has found that the insects developed types of “stealth coating” that serve as acoustic camouflage to evade hungry bats.

Neil will describe his work during the Acoustical Society of America’s 176th Meeting, held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association’s 2018 Acoustics Week, Nov. 5-9 at the Victoria Conference Centre in Victoria, Canada.

In his presentation, Neil will focus on how fur on a moth’s thorax and wing joints provide acoustic stealth by reducing the echoes of these body parts from bat calls.

“Thoracic fur provides substantial acoustic stealth at all ecologically relevant ultrasonic frequencies,” said Neil, a researcher at Bristol University. “The thorax fur of moths acts as a lightweight porous sound absorber, facilitating acoustic camouflage and offering a significant survival advantage against bats.” Removing the fur from the moth’s thorax increased its detection risk by as much as 38 percent.

In comparing the effects of removing thorax fur from insects that serve as food for bats to those that don’t, Neil’s research team found that thoracic fur determines acoustic camouflage of moths but not butterflies.

“We found that the fur on moths was both thicker and denser than that of the butterflies, and these parameters seem to be linked with the absorptive performance of their respective furs,” Neil said. “The thorax fur of the moths was able to absorb up to 85 percent of the impinging sound energy. The maximum absorption we found in butterflies was just 20 percent.”– Materials provided by Acoustical Society of America More.

Well, butterflies are usually active during the day, when bats scarce and noise is common.

Interesting how we take for granted that something can just “evolve” randomly by natural selection acting on random mutation, given enough time, but no one works it out. Probably because the probability is against it. Darwinism is a faith and not one that favors examination of the evidence.

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See also: “Confounding”: Moths and butterflies predate flowering plants by millions of years

and

Porchlight causes moths to evolve?

Comments
It's simply too improbable that such a thing should suddenly appear fully formed. Therefore, it must have evolved.Mung
November 8, 2018
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