Bats catch prey with technology ... missiles

The bat is eye-catching. When the baseball player chases the flying ball, he keeps a constant angle between the run and the ball, in a straight line. The task of bats is much more difficult, they must catch insects on the way, while the prey is very tricky.

A recent study found bats aimed at the goal of . control missiles.

Bats feed in the night by releasing ultrasonic pulses through the mouth. These pulses strike the insect and reflect back. The whole time from detection to less than 1 second.

The team of Kaushik Ghose of the University of Maryland filmed infrared videos and recorded the sounds of large brown bats while catching insects.

The video shows the bat holding its head towards the target, very much like a baseball player staring at the ball. But instead of keeping a constant angle and speed during the approach, the bat constantly changes the velocity and angle of incidence. In parallel, it still does not take its eyes off its prey.

" If the insect was originally northwest, the bat would glide continuously to keep the target in this direction while approaching it ," Ghose said. " This strategy is called parallel positioning. Interestingly, by the end of 1940, engineers when solving the problem of how to program control missiles to hit targets had adopted a strategy. same ".

A frontal attack seems much easier. But this is not the case. The bat had to pre-determine the location where it thought it would snatch the prey.

"It turns out that bat's strategy is to optimize the time it takes to catch slow mobile targets ," Ghose said.

T. An