BATS owe their hunting prowess to superfast muscles in their larynx, which allow them to make a series of increasingly rapid calls as they home in on their prey.
Most bats use echolocation to find prey. After a bat spots an insect it calls more frequently to get more information about the speed and direction of its prey, eventually calling up to 160 times a second (160 hertz). This final sequence of calls is known as the terminal buzz.
The muscles that uses to create the buzz move so quickly that they are classed as “superfast”, says of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense (Science, ).
Advertisement
The bats’ muscles are among the fastest known to exist, able to contract and relax at frequencies up to 200 Hz. Elemans knew that to enable them to sing complex songs. Hummingbird wings, by comparison, can clock only around 40 Hz.
“When bats evolved about 50 million years ago, the skies were full of night-flying insects that nobody was eating,” Elemans says. Echolocation by itself would not have been enough to hunt fast-moving insects in the dark, but the addition of superfast muscles and the terminal buzz could have given bats the advantage. “Most bats that echolocate with their larynx probably have these muscles,” he says.