How common big-eared bats pick out insects on leaves

How common big-eared bats pick out insects on leavesHunting on the wing, bats that pluck insects from the air have little to fear from masking echolocation clicks reflected by nearby clutter: few distracting reflections return from the surroundings.But how do common big-eared bats (Micronycteris microtis) that snatch insects nestled on vegetation deal with potentially distracting reflections from surrounding leaves?Dieter Vanderelst, from the University of Cincinnati, USA, explains that big-eared bats might take advantage of how flat surfaces mostly reflect echoes away from the incoming animal as they approach from an angle, whereas reflections from tasty insects perched on a leaf should return directly to the incoming predator.But bats wishing to exploit this tactic would need to search each leaf individually, wasting precious time scanning unoccupied leaves.So, how could foraging big-eared bats scale up their strategy to distinguish rare, occupied leaves from the unoccupied majority?Vanderelst wondered whether the animals might swiftly scan vegetation, keeping anInside JEB highlights the key developments in Journal of Experimental Biology.Written by science journalists, each short report gives the inside view of the science in JEB.