Meeting Abstract

S1-1.2  Friday, Jan. 4  Anti-bat behavioral strategies and evolutionary routes in the escalation of the bat-moth arms race BARBER, Jesse/R*; KAWAHARA, Akito/Y; Boise State University; University of Florida jessebarber@boisestate.edu

Bat-insect interactions date back millions of years, and the shared evolutionary history between echolocating bats and nocturnal insects have resulted in a suite of unique defensive strategies. Tiger moths have escalated the arms race by beaming ultrasonic response signals back at bats. In tiger moths, these sounds have been shown to warn bats of bad taste, function in acoustic mimicry complexes and jam bat biosonar. We will discuss our recent discovery that hawkmoths also produce ultrasound in response to bat attack. Unlike tiger moths, hawkmoths are not chemically defended, only males produce ultrasound and the structure of the sound-producing organ varies greatly across the family. This raises the prospect that anti-bat ultrasound production may be linked to multiple additional behavioral strategies, including cross-family acoustic mimicry, advertisement of physical defenses and/or evasive flight; and that hawkmoth ultrasonic reply to bat attack has multiple independent evolutionary origins. We will consider data from three main technical approaches: 1) high-speed filming experiments of bat-moth interactions in the lab, 2) playback of bat echolocation attacks to moths in the field and 3) construction of an evolutionary tree built on molecular (DNA) data that we are using to examine the historical transitions of anti-bat ultrasound production.