It’s a sting! Bats buzz like wasps to trick enemy

IT’S well known bats use a builtin sonar to hunt for prey – but it turns out that’s not the limit of their impressive vocal skills.

The clever creatures can even imitate the buzzing sound of hornets to stop owls from eating them, a study shows.

Researchers said their discovery is the first case of mammals performing ‘Batesian mimicry’ – named after English naturalist Henry Walter Bates – which is when a harmless species copies a more dangerous one to protect itself from predators.

The team, who published their findings in the Current Biology journal, made the discovery by recording the sounds made by bats caught in mist nets, and played them back to owls to see how the birds reacted.

The birds consistently reacted to insect and bat buzzes by moving further from the speaker.

Dr Danilo Russo, of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, said: ‘Buzzing might deceive the predator for a fraction of a second, enough to fly away.’