Dangerous Sex

Here's one-way bats might get their next meal: by eavesdropping on flies having sex. Bats eat a lot of seemingly undetectable flies. To find out how the winged mammals find the insects, researchers set up a video camera inside a cowshed that was home to a bat colony and lots of bugs. The video showed that bats rely on their echolocation skills to detect flies at a specific time: when they're engaged in rather noisy sex.Flies are usually quiet in bat [territory:environment] and sit on [cluttered:mass] ceilings in caves where [background:surrounding] noise masks the echoes from their movement. But when flies are feeling frisky, males can't help but flutter their wings, [emitting:Releasing] a burst of click sounds that the bats pick up on. During more than one thousand sexual [encounters:activities] caught in the act on video, five percent of the insects were caught in the act by bats. The [research:study] is published in the journal Current Biology. The study shows that ignorance can be safer than carnal knowledge when predators are on the prowl.