Behavioral science: hunting falcons target herds | Nature Communications | nature wallet

This week’s newspaper reported that hawks that hunt bats fly toward a fixed point within the flock, rather than targeting individual bats.Nature Connections The results will help us understand how predators select and track targets from among thousands of potential prey.

It is common for being in large groups (flocks of bats, flocks of birds, flocks of fish, etc.) to provide protection from predators. One way to protect yourself is the “confusion effect”. In other words, large numbers of potential prey confuse predators, making it difficult to target and capture specific individuals. If predators are confused, success rates of prey capture should decrease as the number of potential prey increases. However, the empirical evidence for the perturbation effect is inconsistent.

Caroline Brighton and colleagues now show that beaked hawksbills (Poteo swensoni) and other birds of prey hunt groups of about 700,000 to 900,000 Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) that emerge from caves at night. I watched what was happening. Using a number of cameras, Brighton and colleagues reconstructed and analyzed the three-dimensional flight paths of raptors and bats and found how the raptors coped with the effect of the turbulence. In other words, raptors are thought to target fixed points within a flock, rather than individual bats. Brighton and colleagues believe that bats that do not change their relative trait as seen by raptors are bats on a collision course that they target.

Brighton and colleagues suggest that a fixed-point targeting strategy within shallow prey may be a more general, non-specific mechanism for other predators, although shallow waters of prey may be sufficient. It also indicates that it may only be effective in densely populated areas.

doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32354-5

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