The endless struggle to survive has driven harmless species to evolve elaborate strategies of deceiving predators. Batesian mimicry involves imitations of noxious species’ warning signals by palatable mimics. Clearwing moths (Lepidoptera: Sesiidae), incapable of inflicting painful bites or stings, resemble bees or wasps in their morphology and sometimes imitate their behaviours. An entirely unexplored type of deception in sesiids is acoustic mimicry. We recorded the buzzing sounds of two species of Southeast Asian clearwing moths, Heterosphecia pahangensis and H. hyaloptera and compared them to their visual model bee, Tetragonilla collina, and two control species of bees occurring in the same habitat. Recordings were performed on untethered, flying insects in nature. Based on eight acoustic parameters and wingbeat frequencies calculated from slow-motion videos, we found that the buzzes produced by both clearwing moths highly resemble those of T. collina but differ from the two control species of bees. Acoustic similarities to bees, alongside morphological and behavioural imitations, indicate that clearwing moths display multimodal mimicry of their evolutionary models.

中文翻译：

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东南亚飞蛾像它们的模型蜜蜂一样嗡嗡作响

无休止的生存斗争促使无害物种进化出精心设计的欺骗捕食者的策略。Batesian 拟态涉及通过可口的拟态来模仿有害物种的警告信号。Clearwing moths (Lepidoptera: Sesiidae)，不能造成痛苦的叮咬或叮咬，它们的形态类似于蜜蜂或黄蜂，有时会模仿它们的行为。sesiids中一种完全未被探索的欺骗类型是声音模仿。我们记录了两种东南亚飞蛾 Heterosphecia pahangensis 和 H. hyaloptera 的嗡嗡声，并将它们与它们的视觉模型蜜蜂 Tetragonilla collina 和发生在同一栖息地的两种对照蜜蜂进行了比较。录音是在自然界中不受束缚的飞行昆虫上进行的。基于从慢动作视频中计算出的八个声学参数和翼拍频率，我们发现两种飞蛾产生的嗡嗡声与 T. collina 的嗡嗡声非常相似，但不同于蜜蜂的两种对照物种。与蜜蜂的声学相似性，以及形态和行为模仿，表明飞蛾表现出对其进化模型的多模态模仿。