Moths draped in stealth acoustic cloak evade bat sonar (opens in new tab)

There's a catch for a moth fur farm startup though (plush might work better):

> The acoustic cloak works between 20kHz and 160kHz

To use in construction one must have to answer some very difficult questions like how well does the material survive dust and the cleaning process? How long does it last by itself? How does it interact with the other constraints like fire resistance, allergies, etc?

And after all that, filtering low frequencies is still a hopeless task.

One does have to consider the frequency, I’m assuming dampening high frequency sound is easier than low frequency.

After listening to best softies of the 80s for 3 hours from my neighbors walls, yes please.

I also play guitar so to have a “jam box” would be great. Like a vocal box where you’re isolated but for really REALLY loud guitars.

I would love it around my place, on the walls, no more loud neighbors would make this place paradise!

According to the story it's not about jamming the sonar but giving of a warning that the moth is toxic. Sort of the acoustic equivalent of bright colors that some toxic animals have.

that's what I though of:

https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%E2%80%99d-...

I wonder if some of these processes might start out with a kind of genetic anti-resiliency that's selected for. Moths seem to have a wide variety of wing patterns and heavily rely on them for camouflage and mimicry (like when eyes are mimicked). Maybe the genes related to wing surfaces reduced in number over time, making wings more sensitive to mutation and variation. Kind of like increasing the wing learning rate at an evolutionary level.

That could increase the odds that they'd eventually stumble upon things like this anti-sonar texturing, and that more advanced versions of it would start to appear. Maybe it could also have a role in the infamous peppered moth/pollution story.

And by contrast, maybe nature would also select for extreme resiliency of critical genes, like ones related to heart function and efficiency of resource use, so that they'd be less sensitive to generational variation.

I'm sure this could all still be explained even without that, but it's interesting to think about.

Something like that. Evolution = natural variation + natural selection.

In any given population there is natural variation: fastest moth, hairiest moth, whitest moth, etc. After evolutionary pressure is applied, the other moths are preferentially devoured, and the hairiest moth becomes the dominant variation with the most offspring.

For a similar historic account, read about the black form of the peppered moth which rapidly took over the moth population, caused by evolutionary pressure + single mutation in the year 1819.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36424768

Well the ones that didn’t do this got eaten by bats, it’s very easy to see how survival of the fittest works CB in this case. Designing an eye with evolution seems somewhat harder...

A single moth had a mutation that made it wings ever so slightly scaled in a way the absorbed a tiny fraction of bat sonar. This allowed it to reproduce slightly more than the rest of the population, so its mutation was reinforced.

With our current understating of placing all specialization on mutation and natural selection, it requires the unsaid of millions of useless iterations and dead moths and starving bats.

My completely uneducated guess is that this is probably similar in approach to ‘Vantablack’, in that you'll have to orient the scales a certain way relative to each other and the base. So they'll need to be likewise ‘grown’ on the surface, in a slow and very expensive process. (Though apparently there are VB variants as spray paint, presumably with lower absorption.) Of course, this is after someone even figures out how to make such scales and slap them together on the base.

This pavillion is the largest object on which VB was used to my knowledge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxkvKJmlyHQ

However, it's hard to imagine VB being grown on it instead of sprayed, and the next-largest candidate seems to be the BMW X6.