The research was undertaken by Dr Caroline Brighton, a post-doc with the Oxford Flight Group in the Department of Biology at Oxford University, alongside colleagues from the University of New Hampshire. If predators get confused, then they should become less successful at catching prey as the prey’s group size increases. By pairing two cameras in stereo, Dr Brighton and colleagues filmed hawks hunting the bats as they emerged at dusk. They then reconstructed the hawks’ flight paths in 3D and compared the trajectories of the real birds with the trajectories modelled by a computer algorithm. The researchers found that, instead of continuously targeting an individual bat, the hawks would steer towards a fixed point within the swarm.
