Conservationists often object to wind farms because of the possibility that they could kill birds. But birds aren’t the only flying animals to be taken out by turbines – it turns out that bats often lose their lives too, and not in quite the way you might imagine.

Recently, scientists have noticed a large number of dead bats at wind farms around the world. The turbines seem to be taking a particularly heavy toll on migratory species and while it was clear that the scale of these deaths is much larger than expected, it’s less clear why they’re happening at all.

Bats can fly through pitch-darkness through echolocation – a superb biological sonar system that’s particularly good at detecting moving objects.