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    "headline": "Hawkmoths jam bat sonar with ultrasound made by their genitals, and the trick evolved up to 7 times",
    "description": "Male hawkmoths rub genital scales to click ultrasound at hunting bats, and a November 2026 study finds the defense evolved up to seven separate times.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-14T04:24:00+00:00",
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    "articleSection": "Pets & Animals",
    "keywords": "Akito Kawahara, Bats, Florida Museum of Natural History, Hawkmoths, Sphingidae",
    "articleBody": "When a bat closes in on a male hawkmoth, many species answer with a burst of ultrasonic clicks, and those clicks come from the moth’s genitals. A study published on November 4 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B finds that this odd sonar-jamming trick did not appear once in hawkmoth history. It arose independently up to seven times. The team, led by Paul Masonick, Jesse Barber and Akito Kawahara of the Florida Museum of Natural History and partner institutions, combined a decade of field recordings with electron microscopy, micro-CT scans and a dated family tree covering 310 hawkmoth species. How a moth makes noise with its rear end The mechanism is a kind of tiny washboard. A patch of enlarged scraper scales sits on the clasper-like valves of the male genitalia. When the moth flexes them, those scales rub across a file on the eighth abdominal segment, producing pulses of ultrasound far above the range of human hearing. The researchers sorted the files into three designs: Scale-on-scale, where scrapers rub over modified scales, seen mainly in the subfamily Smerinthinae. Scale-on-spine, where the file is a row of spines, found in some Sphinginae. Scale-on-nodule, where scrapers drag over bumpy microsculpture, common in Macroglossinae. The paper says this is the first description of that file. In one genus, Hippotion, the nodules have merged into narrow parallel ridges, giving the moth something close to a ribbed sounding board. Jamming, not just warning Moth ultrasound can do several jobs: advertise bad taste, mimic a toxic species, startle a bat mid-strike or jam its sonar. Jamming needs a dense signal. The authors note that some hawkmoths click for more than 20% of a given time window, a duty cycle they describe as key to scrambling a bat’s echoes. Many of these moths can hear the attack coming. Hawkmoth ears are built into their mouthparts, and most eared species tested answered recorded bat calls with clicks of their own. Members of the earless subfamily Smerinthinae ignored the playback, yet about half of the 31 species tested still clicked when handled, a fallback for the moment of capture. The numbers behind the arms race Of the 143 male hawkmoth species tested so far, 77 emit ultrasound. That works out to roughly 54%, or slightly more than one in two species, across a family of about 1,600. The dissections covered 124 species from all four subfamilies. The timing also matters. Bats evolved laryngeal echolocation around 50 million years ago, long before any hawkmoth was estimated to click back. The moth defenses appeared within roughly the past 30 million years, which fits an arms race where prey caught up late and then caught up repeatedly. The same group laid the groundwork more than a decade ago. A 2015 study by Kawahara’s Florida Museum team, run with Barber’s lab at Boise State University, tested 124 hawkmoth species and found nearly half produced ultrasound with their genitalia. In lab trials against big brown bats, the defense worked immediately and consistently. “Before now people thought ultrasound usage in insects was very restricted to certain groups, but it looks much more complex than that,” Kawahara said at the time. A different instrument from tiger moths Tiger moths, the better-known noisemakers, click using tymbals, vibrating membranes on the thorax. Hawkmoths reached a similar result with a completely different body part, which is why the authors call the pattern redundancy in bioacoustic warfare. The Florida Museum’s moth work has shown up here before, in its experiment that widened luna moth tails to test how they fool bats. On the other side of the fight, Badiyaa has also looked at the Ussuri tube-nosed bat that hibernates in snow. The study focused only on males. Some female hawkmoths also click, and the authors say how common that is, and what it is for, has barely been documented. Further reading Proc. R. Soc. B: The repeated evolution of anti-bat bioacoustics in hawkmoths Wikipedia: Sphingidae Image: Asurnipal, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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