China News Service, Beijing, August 24 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's academic journal "Nature-Communications" recently published an animal behavior study that pointed out that eagles hunting swarms of bats will head towards a fixed point in the cluster Move, not target a single bat.
The results could help understand how predators select and track a target from among thousands of potential prey.
A Swain's Buzzard attacks a colony of Brazilian dog-beaked bats in a bat cave in New Mexico, USA (Image source: Corresponding author of the paper).
Photo courtesy of Springer Nature
According to the paper, animals are generally believed to protect themselves from predators by hiding in large groups of the same species, such as swarms of bats, birds or fish. The role of predators makes it more difficult for predators to target and capture specific individuals.
If predators are confused, their success in catching prey decreases as the number of prey increases.
However, the empirical evidence for the "confounding effect" has been inconsistent.
Co-corresponding authors Caroline Brighton and Graham Taylor of the University of Oxford, UK, collaborated with colleagues and peers to understand how Swain's Buzzard and other birds of prey hunt night out from a cave About 700,000 to 900,000 Brazilian dog-nosed bats were observed in groups.
Using an array of cameras, they reconstructed the 3D flight trajectories of these raptors and bats.
Their analysis revealed one way that raptors deal with the "confusing effect": instead of targeting a single bat, the raptor will stare at a fixed point in the bat colony; a bat in the collision path will always be seen by the raptor. Being in a fixed position makes it stand out from the bat colony.
The authors point out that this strategy of staring at a fixed point in a swarm of prey may be a general mechanism that has yet to be discovered in other predators.
However, they also pointed out that this strategy may only be useful if the prey is dense enough.
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