Ultrasound avoidance

Ultrasound avoidance is an escape or avoidance reflex displayed by certain animal species that are preyed upon by echolocating predators. Ultrasound avoidance is known for several groups of insects that have independently evolved mechanisms for ultrasonic hearing. Insects have evolved a variety of ultrasound-sensitive ears based upon a vibrating tympanic membrane tuned to sense the bat's echolocating calls. The ultrasonic hearing is coupled to a motor response that causes evasion of the bat during flight.

Although ultrasonic signals are used for echolocation by toothed whales, no known examples of ultrasonic avoidance in their prey have been found to date.

Ultrasonic hearing has evolved multiple times in insects: a total of 19 times. Bats appeared in the Eocene era, (about 50 million years ago); antibat tactics should have evolved then. Antibat tactics are known in four orders of Insecta : moths (Lepidoptera), crickets (Orthoptera), mantids (Dictyoptera), and green lacewings (Neuroptera). There are hypotheses of ultrasound avoidance being present in Diptera (flies) and Coleoptera (beetles).

The idea that moths were able to hear the cries of echolocating bats dates back to the late 19th century. White, in an 1877 letter to Nature made the association between the moth's high-pitched sounds and the high-pitched bat calls and wondered whether the moths would be able to hear it. However, it was not until the early 1960s that Kenneth Roeder et al. made the first electrophysiological recordings of a noctuid moth's auditory nerve and were able to confirm this suspicion.

Later research showed that moths responded to ultrasound with evasive movements. Moths, as do crickets and most insects that display bat avoidance behaviors, have tympanic organs that display phonotactic and directional hearing; they fly away from the source of the sound and will only have the diving behavior considered above when the sound is too loud—or when, in a natural setting, the bat would be presumably too close to simply fly away.

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