Crickets evade bats via olfaction beyond acoustic cues.

Overview

1. Jilin Provincial Key Laboratory of Animal Resource and Ecological Security, Northeast Normal University Changchun China
2. State Key Laboratory of Green Pesticide, College of Plant Protection, South China Agricultural University Guangzhou China
3. Jilin Provincial International Cooperation Key Laboratory for Biological Control of Agricultural Pests, Jilin Agricultural University Changchun China
4. Key Laboratory of Vegetation Ecology of Education Ministry, Institute of Grassland Science, Northeast Normal University Changchun China

Abstract

The evolutionary arms race between insectivorous bats and their insect prey is a classic paradigm of acoustic predation and evasion, with insects having evolved sophisticated auditory countermeasures. Both bats and insects also rely heavily on olfaction for key behaviors, such as social communication. Moreover, predator-derived odors are well established as risk cues in many other predator–prey systems. However, whether olfaction plays a role in the bat–insect arms race remains unknown. Here, we unveil a previously unknown olfactory dimension to this interaction. We demonstrated that the body odor of the insectivorous bat Scotophilus kuhlii triggered robust avoidance and electrophysiological antennal responses in a common cricket prey, Loxoblemmus equestris. We identified limonene as a behaviorally active volatile in bat odor that elicited electrophysiological responses in cricket antennae and was sufficient to elicit avoidance in crickets. Field experiments confirmed that limonene exposure reduced cricket calling activity, demonstrating the ecological relevance of this cue. Our findings establish that insects can detect and initiate avoidance of phylogenetically distant vertebrate predators via olfaction, a process that could be mediated by the elemental perception of individual odor compounds. This work broadens the sensory framework of a classic predator–prey system and highlights olfactory eavesdropping as a functional strategy in phylogenetically distant predator–prey systems.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

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Data

Datasets cited

• figshare:31077256, at figshare; found in “Data availability”

Data availability

The raw behavioral, electrophysiological, and ecological datasets have been deposited in figshare and are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31077256.

The following dataset was generated:

LiY ZhangW WeiJ XuH FengJ LinA 2026Crickets evade bats via olfaction beyond acoustic cuesfigshare10.6084/m9.figshare.31077256PMC1349832342626927

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, pages, dates, 6 authors, 5 keywords, 9 MeSH terms, 1 funder, 77 references, 8 RRIDs.

Cite

This paper

Li, Y., Zhang, W., Wei, J., Xu, H., Feng, J., & Lin, A. (2026). Crickets evade bats via olfaction beyond acoustic cues. eLife, 15, RP110936. https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.110936

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