Sound strategies: the bat-moth arms race

Tom Eisner had an extraordinary influence on the study of animal behavior. I can best illustrate it by presenting a phylogeny of the students and colleagues who worked with Tom. The multiple trends you can infer from the phylogeny show significant contributions to the diverse fields of bioacoustics, visual ecology, and especially chemical ecology. Above all else, Tom was the consummate experimentalist. He could distill a problem to its least common denominator, design the critical experiment, collect the data, and write the manuscript before the sun went down. A series of experiments on the role of sounds generated by tiger moths as a defense against bats and a simple learning paradigm used to discriminate among several hypotheses exemplify what Tom taught me about designing experiments. The sounds play roles in acoustic aposematism, mimicry, and sonar jamming.