The star of this video is the Myotis volans, or “long-legged Myotis,” a bat that lives in the forests of western North America, from Mexico to Alaska. Myotis volans’ body is three to four inches long, and its wingspan is about 8.5 to 10 inches. The video was shot by scientist Aaron Corcoran, who specializes in the study of bats and moths.
Bats use echolocation to find prey for eating, bouncing high-frequency sounds off objects to “see” the world around them, much like human sonar devices. These ultrasonic sounds tend to be around three times higher in pitch than humans can hear, though some sounds bats make are audible to us. In this slow-motion video, though, the pitch is dropped down into a range where we can hear everything.
As you can see, the bats don’t just eat the moths right out of the air—their wings sweep up the prey in a deathly embrace, pull them down to the tail membrane, and, finally, into their waiting mouths.
If it seems the moths are defenseless—and this video does nothing to disprove that—Corcoran’s research has led him to believe that certain moths may be capable of jamming bats’ sonar. Which would be a useful skill, to say the least.
