Hawkmoths Evolved More Than One Way to Make Ultrasound at Bats

Hawkmoths make ultrasound at hunting bats with at least three mechanically different sound-producing systems, and the behavior evolved independently more than once within the family, a team led by Paul K. Masonick of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida reports in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The paper was published Nov. 4, 2026.

The authors say they investigated how the behavior evolved across the family, and they conclude that conflict with predators drives both new defenses and repeats of the same one. Their analysis of the hawkmoth family tree places the independent origins within the past roughly 30 million years.

The three systems are named for which pair of structures rubs together: scale on scale, scale on spine and scale on nodule. In each, one part acts as a scraper and the other as a file. The team classified them using sound recordings, electron microscope images, high-resolution X-ray scans and a dated family tree of the group. It also reports the first description of the file in the scale-on-nodule system, found in Macroglossinae, one of the hawkmoth subfamilies, along with new details of two mechanisms that had been described before.

The authors also report that different hawkmoth lineages produce acoustically distinct sounds, and that those differences track variation in the sound-producing structures and in whether a species has hearing organs.

The National Science Foundation funded the work.