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Here's one way bats might get their next meal: by eavesdropping on flies having sex.
有一种方法能让蝙蝠抓到下一顿美餐：窃听正在交配的苍蝇。
Bats eat a lot of seemingly undetectable flies. To find out how the winged mammals find the insects, researchers set up a video camera inside a cowshed that was home to a bat colony and lots of bugs.
蝙蝠吃掉的许多苍蝇都看似很难发现。为了找出这类有翅膀的哺乳动物如何抓捕昆虫，研究人员在蝙蝠群落脚的一间牛舍里安装了录像机。牛舍里也飞舞着许多蚊虫。
The video showed that bats rely on their echolocation skills to detect flies at a specific time: when they're engaged in rather noisy sex.
摄像机显示在特定的时候，即苍蝇在交配发出噪音的时候，蝙蝠依靠回波定位技术探测猎物。
Flies are usually quiet in bat territory and sit on cluttered ceilings in caves where background noise masks the echoes from their movement.
通常苍蝇在蝙蝠的地盘十分安静，它们停在牛棚内凌乱的天花板上，在那里背景噪音掩盖了它们行动的回声。
But when flies are feeling frisky, males can't help but flutter their wings, emitting a burst of click sounds that the bats pick up on. During more than one thousand sexual encounters caught in the act on video, five percent of the insects were caught in the act by bats. The research is published in the journal Current Biology.
但是当苍蝇感到兴奋时，雄苍蝇禁不住在依恋中振翼，发出一阵阵敲击声，这时便引起了蝙蝠的注意。摄像机拍摄到1000多对苍蝇发生性交，其中5%对被蝙蝠逮个正着。这一研究发表在《当代生物学》期刊上。
The study shows that ignorance can be safer than carnal knowledge when predators are on the prowl.
这项研究表明当捕食者在虎视眈眈四处徘徊时，无知比感性经验更安全。
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