Having sex can be very dangerous if you are a harmless fly and predators stalk you. A study carried out by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology (Germany) reveals that bats are capable oflocate flies by the noise of their wings when they mate, and take advantage of this intimate moment of carelessness to catchin fragrantto their prey.
When an animal mates, attention to its surroundings tends to drop, making it an easy victim for predators. Although this argument has been used by scientists for years, there are few works that have demonstrated it experimentally. Now the study published in the journalCurrent Biologyprovides concrete data and also reveals that in the case of bats of the speciesMyotis nattereri, it is not just a matter of distraction that determines the feast of the animal.
Bats are oriented by an echolocation system, which consists of emitting a sound and capturing the waves that are produced when it bounces off an obstacle. During the night, the flies do not usually fly and are limited to being still or walking. Due to the bottom echo, it is practically impossible to detect them by echolocation. But when animals copulate, things change. Males emit asounds when flapping their wingsthat are caught by attentive bats, who have no qualms about attacking flies by surprise.
The researchers analyzed more than 9,000 recordings of the animals and found that about 26 percent of mating pairs were attacked by bats. In addition, to verify that it was the copulation scandal that attracted them, they placed pairs of dead flies simulating the sexual act, but these were only attacked when the montagea recording of the sounds was accompaniedof copulation. Stefan Graif, one of the authors, sums up the work in a simple conclusion: “Sex kills them.”
