Like a football player running interference, a Mexican free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis) can block a competitor's ability to get a meal, a new study says for the first time.

Scientists observed bats using an acoustic call to jam another's echolocation—the process of bouncing sound waves off nearby objects to sense what's around them. (See National Geographic's best bat pictures.)

Many bats echolocate to zero in on prey, such as insects—and without it, hunting is nearly impossible.

The new research, published November 6 in Science, reveals that the Mexican free-tailed bat makes the interference call when another bat of the same species is closing in on dinner.

He was studying how the Grote's tiger moth (Bertholdia trigona) jams the sonar of