July 12, 2009 - Bug Zapper

Welcome to the Nature Notebook.

Look skyward in the evening twilight and you might see the dips and twists of the quarter-ounce little brown bat. This bat’s ability to consume over 1,000 mosquito-sized insects in an hour might well qualify it as nature’s bug zapper. Using high frequency pulses of sound above the range of human hearing, bats navigate and find insects by the echo of sound waves bounding off an object. As a bat approaches its insect prey, it emits a rapid series of pulses known as a feeding buzz. Scientists have recorded these sounds and translated them into frequencies that we can hear. These pulses track the insect precisely until the time of capture. Seeing these small creatures flying about in the gathering dusk can be unnerving, but they are doing us a service by consuming perky insects.
 
This is PPL's naturalist, Jon Beam, with the Nature Notebook for WVIA.