Stop and drop, cricket style
Published May 19, 2020
Sword-tailed crickets in Panama have developed a nifty trick for evading bats: They’ve learned to distinguish the bats’ ultrasonic echolocation sounds from the jungle background noise.
When a bat gets within seven meters (22.9 feet in Freedom Units™) the crickets stop flying and drop silently to evade the hungry rodents. And the louder the bat, the further the cricket will let itself fall.
