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Bats navigating with echolocation - which is a type of active sensing achieved by interpreting echoes resulting from self-generated ultrasonic pulses - exhibit unique behaviors during group flight. While bats may benefit from eavesdropping on their peers׳ echolocation, they also potentially suffer from confusion between their own and peers׳ pulses, caused by an effect called frequency jamming. This hardship of group flight is supported by experimental observations of bats simplifying their sound-scape by shifting their pulse frequencies or suppressing echolocation altogether. Here, we investigate eavesdropping and varying pulse emission rate from a modeling perspective to understand these behaviors׳ potential benefits and detriments. We define an agent-based model of echolocating bats avoiding collisions in a three-dimensional tunnel. Through simulation, we show that bats with reasonably accurate eavesdropping can reduce collisions compared to those neglecting information from peers. In large populations, bats minimize frequency jamming by decreasing pulse emission rate, while collision risk increases; conversely, increasing pulse emission rate minimizes collisions by allowing more sensing information generated per bat. These strategies offer benefits for both biological and engineered systems, since frequency jamming is a concern in systems using active sensing., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

We establish an agent-based model to study the impact of prey behavior on the hunting success of predators. The predators and prey are modeled as self-propelled particles moving in a three-dimensional domain and subject to specific sensing abilities and behavioral rules inspired by bat hunting. The predators randomly search for prey. The prey either align velocity directions with peers, defined as "interacting" prey, or swarm "independently" of peer presence; both types of prey are subject to additive noise. In a simulation study, we find that interacting prey using low noise have the maximum predation avoidance because they form localized large groups, while they suffer high predation as noise increases due to the formation of broadly dispersed small groups. Independent prey, which are likely to be uniformly distributed in the domain, have higher predation risk under a low noise regime as they traverse larger spatial extents. These effects are enhanced in large prey populations, which exhibit more ordered collective behavior or more uniform spatial distribution as they are interacting or independent, respectively.