Tag Archives: echolocation

Moths with sound absorption stealth technology

Leave a reply
The cabbage tree emperor moth (Thomas Neil) [downloaded from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/nov-17-2018-greenland-asteroid-impact-short-people-in-the-rain-forest-reef-islands-and-sea-level-and-more-1.4906857/how-moths-evolved-a-kind-of-stealth-jet-technology-to-sneak-past-bats-1.4906866]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more gorgeous moth and it seems a perfect way to enter 2019, from a November 16, 2018 news item on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation),

A species of silk moth has evolved special sound absorbing scales on its wings to absorb the sonar pulses from hunting bats. This is analogous to the special coatings on stealth aircraft that allow them to be nearly invisible to radar.

“It’s a battle out there every night, insects flying for their lives trying to avoid becoming a bat’s next dinner,” said Dr. Marc Holderied, the senior author on the paper and an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol.

“If you manage to absorb some of these sound energies, it would make you look smaller and let you be detectable over a shorter distance because echoe isn’t strong enough outside the detection bubble.”

Many moths have ears that warn them when a bat is nearby. But not the big and juicy cabbage tree emperor moths which would ordinarily make the perfect meal for bats.

…

The researchers prepared a brief animated feature illustrating the research,

Prior to publication of the study, the scientists made a presentation at the Acoustical Society of America’s 176th Meeting, held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association’s 2018 Acoustics Week, Nov. 5-9 at the Victoria Conference Centre in Victoria, Canada according to a November 7, 2018 University of Bristol press release (also on EurekAlert but submitted by the Acoustical Society of America on November 6, 2018),

Moths are a mainstay food source for bats, which use echolocation (biological sonar) to hunt their prey. Scientists such as Thomas Neil, from the University of Bristol in the U.K., are studying how moths have evolved passive defenses over millions of years to resist their primary predators.

While some moths have evolved ears that detect the ultrasonic calls of bats, many types of moths remain deaf. In those moths, Neil has found that the insects developed types of “stealth coating” that serve as acoustic camouflage to evade hungry bats.

Neil will describe his work during the Acoustical Society of America’s 176th Meeting, held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association’s 2018 Acoustics Week, Nov. 5-9 at the Victoria Conference Centre in Victoria, Canada.

In his presentation, Neil will focus on how fur on a moth’s thorax and wing joints provide acoustic stealth by reducing the echoes of these body parts from bat calls.

“Thoracic fur provides substantial acoustic stealth at all ecologically relevant ultrasonic frequencies,” said Neil, a researcher at Bristol University. “The thorax fur of moths acts as a lightweight porous sound absorber, facilitating acoustic camouflage and offering a significant survival advantage against bats.” Removing the fur from the moth’s thorax increased its detection risk by as much as 38 percent.

Neil used acoustic tomography to quantify echo strength in the spatial and frequency domains of two deaf moth species that are subject to bat predation and two butterfly species that are not.

In comparing the effects of removing thorax fur from insects that serve as food for bats to those that don’t, Neil’s research team found that thoracic fur determines acoustic camouflage of moths but not butterflies.

“We found that the fur on moths was both thicker and denser than that of the butterflies, and these parameters seem to be linked with the absorptive performance of their respective furs,” Neil said. “The thorax fur of the moths was able to absorb up to 85 percent of the impinging sound energy. The maximum absorption we found in butterflies was just 20 percent.”

Neil’s research could contribute to the development of biomimetic materials for ultrathin sound absorbers and other noise-control devices.

“Moth fur is thin and lightweight,” said Neil, “and acts as a broadband and multidirectional ultrasound absorber that is on par with the performance of current porous sound-absorbing foams.”

Moth fur? This has changed my view of moths although I reserve the right to get cranky when local moths chew through my wool sweaters. Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Biomechanics of a moth scale at ultrasonic frequencies by Zhiyuan Shen, Thomas R. Neil, Daniel Robert, Bruce W. Drinkwater, and Marc W. Holderied. PNAS [Proccedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America] November 27, 2018 115 (48) 12200-12205; published ahead of print November 12, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810025115

This paper is behind a paywall.

Unusually I’m going to include the paper’s abstract here,

The wings of moths and butterflies are densely covered in scales that exhibit intricate shapes and sculptured nanostructures. While certain butterfly scales create nanoscale photonic effects [emphasis mine], moth scales show different nanostructures suggesting different functionality. Here we investigate moth-scale vibrodynamics to understand their role in creating acoustic camouflage against bat echolocation, where scales on wings provide ultrasound absorber functionality. For this, individual scales can be considered as building blocks with adapted biomechanical properties at ultrasonic frequencies. The 3D nanostructure of a full Bunaea alcinoe moth forewing scale was characterized using confocal microscopy. Structurally, this scale is double layered and endowed with different perforation rates on the upper and lower laminae, which are interconnected by trabeculae pillars. From these observations a parameterized model of the scale’s nanostructure was formed and its effective elastic stiffness matrix extracted. Macroscale numerical modeling of scale vibrodynamics showed close qualitative and quantitative agreement with scanning laser Doppler vibrometry measurement of this scale’s oscillations, suggesting that the governing biomechanics have been captured accurately. Importantly, this scale of B. alcinoe exhibits its first three resonances in the typical echolocation frequency range of bats, suggesting it has evolved as a resonant absorber. Damping coefficients of the moth-scale resonator and ultrasonic absorption of a scaled wing were estimated using numerical modeling. The calculated absorption coefficient of 0.50 agrees with the published maximum acoustic effect of wing scaling. Understanding scale vibroacoustic behavior helps create macroscopic structures with the capacity for broadband acoustic camouflage.

Those nanoscale photonic effects caused by butterfly scales are something I’d usually describe as optical effects due to the nanoscale structures on some butterfly wings, notably those of the Blue Morpho butterfly. In fact there’s a whole field of study on what’s known as structural colo(u)r. Strictly speaking I’m not sure you could describe the nanostructures on Glasswing butterflies as an example of structure colour since those structures make that butterfly’s wings transparent but they are definitely an optical effect. For the curious, you can use ‘blue morpho butterfly’, ‘glasswing butterfly’ or ‘structural colo(u)r’ to search for more on this blog or pursue bigger fish with an internet search.

“Ears like a bat” could come true for humans?

Leave a reply

That old saying which describes people with exceptional hearing as having “ears like a bat” may come true if University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) researchers have their way. From a July 7, 2015 news item on Nanowerk,

University of California, Berkeley, physicists have used graphene to build lightweight ultrasonic loudspeakers and microphones, enabling people to mimic bats or dolphins’ ability to use sound to communicate and gauge the distance and speed of objects around them.

A July 6, 2015 UC Berkeley news release by Robert Sanders (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the problem addressed by the research and the new approach taken,

More practically, the wireless ultrasound devices complement standard radio transmission using electromagnetic waves in areas where radio is impractical, such as underwater, but with far more fidelity than current ultrasound or sonar devices. They can also be used to communicate through objects, such as steel, that electromagnetic waves can’t penetrate.

“Sea mammals and bats use high-frequency sound for echolocation and communication, but humans just haven’t fully exploited that before, in my opinion, because the technology has not been there,” said UC Berkeley physicist Alex Zettl. “Until now, we have not had good wideband ultrasound transmitters or receivers. These new devices are a technology opportunity.”

Speakers and microphones both use diaphragms, typically made of paper or plastic, that vibrate to produce or detect sound, respectively. The diaphragms in the new devices are graphene sheets a mere one atom thick that have the right combination of stiffness, strength and light weight to respond to frequencies ranging from subsonic (below 20 hertz) to ultrasonic (above 20 kilohertz). Humans can hear from 20 hertz up to 20,000 hertz, whereas bats hear only in the kilohertz range, from 9 to 200 kilohertz. The grapheme loudspeakers and microphones operate from well below 20 hertz to over 500 kilohertz.

Graphene consists of carbon atoms laid out in a hexagonal, chicken-wire arrangement, which creates a tough, lightweight sheet with unique electronic properties that have excited the physics world for the past 20 or more years.

“There’s a lot of talk about using graphene in electronics and small nanoscale devices, but they’re all a ways away,” said Zettl, who is a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute, operated jointly by UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab. “The microphone and loudspeaker are some of the closest devices to commercial viability, because we’ve worked out how to make the graphene and mount it, and it’s easy to scale up.”

Zettl, UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Qin Zhou and colleagues describe their graphene microphone and ultrasonic radio in a paper appearing online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Radios and rangefinders

Two years ago, Zhou built loudspeakers using a sheet of graphene for the diaphragm, and since then has been developing the electronic circuitry to build a microphone with a similar graphene diaphragm.

One big advantage of graphene is that the atom-thick sheet is so lightweight that it responds well to the different frequencies of an electronic pulse, unlike today’s piezoelectric microphones and speakers. This comes in handy when using ultrasonic transmitters and receivers to transmit large amounts of information through many different frequency channels simultaneously, or to measure distance, as in sonar applications.

“Because our membrane is so light, it has an extremely wide frequency response and is able to generate sharp pulses and measure distance much more accurately than traditional methods,” Zhou said.

Graphene membranes are also more efficient, converting over 99 percent of the energy driving the device into sound, whereas today’s conventional loudspeakers and headphones convert only 8 percent into sound. Zettl anticipates that in the future, communications devices like cellphones will utilize not only electromagnetic waves – radio – but also acoustic or ultrasonic sound, which can be highly directional and long-range.

“Graphene is a magical material; it hits all the sweet spots for a communications device,” he said.

You never know who can give you a new idea for your research, from the news release,

When Zhou told his wife, Jinglin Zheng [also a physicist], about the ultrasound microphone, she suggested he try to capture the sound of bats chirping at frequencies too high for humans to hear. So they hauled the microphone to a park in Livermore and turned it on. When they slowed down the recording to one-tenth normal speed, converting the high frequencies to an audio range humans can hear, they were amazed at the quality and fidelity of the bat vocalizations.

“This is lightweight enough to mount on a bat and record what the bat can hear,” Zhou said.

Bat expert Michael Yartsev, a newly hired UC Berkeley assistant professor of bioengineering and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, said, “These new microphones will be incredibly valuable for studying auditory signals at high frequencies, such as the ones used by bats. The use of graphene allows the authors to obtain very flat frequency responses in a wide range of frequencies, including ultrasound, and will permit a detailed study of the auditory pulses that are used by bats.”

Zettl noted that audiophiles would also appreciate the graphene loudspeakers and headphones, which have a flat response across the entire audible frequency range.

“A number of years ago, this device would have been darn near impossible to build because of the difficulty of making free-standing graphene sheets,” Zettl said. “But over the past decade the graphene community has come together to develop techniques to grow, transport and mount graphene, so building a device like this is now very straightforward; the design is simple.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Graphene electrostatic microphone and ultrasonic radio by Qin Zhou, Jinglin Zheng, Seita Onishi, M. F. Crommie, Alex K. Zettl. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015; 201505800 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1505800112

This paper is behind a paywall.