Everyone knows that bats use sonar to help find their prey in the dark, but a new study suggests that bats are also using their echo-location abilities to jam other bats’ sonar frequencies in competition for available prey.

The night skies turn into the sites of aerial dogfights between bats, who use ultrasonic clicks to send a jamming signal covering all frequencies used by another bat, keeping it from shifting to another frequency to hunt for prey, according to the study, which was published in the journal Science.

According to New Scientist, the jamming happens when the signal from another bat disrupts the bat’s ability to use echolocation to pinpoint prey in the dark, which can happen when many bets are focusing on the same hunting grounds.

Although in most cases the jamming is inadvertent, the study found that sometimes it was intentional by identifying a second type of sonar jamming that appears to be designed by evolution specifically to disrupt another bat.

To make this finding, researchers compared flight-path calculations with audio and video field records, and discovered that there is a special ultrasonic signal that bats emit that interact with echolocation.

Unlike in accidental jamming, which happens when two bats used a single frequency and can be avoided by simply switching to a different frequency, the other jamming signal covers all frequencies.

Researchers played back recordings of these types of jammings and found that bats missed their targets. It causes the bat to miss its insect target, even though it knows that the insect is in the general area.

Bats do this because competition for food is scarce, and a meal for one bat may mean and empty stomach for another. Oftentimes there can be a million individual bats in a single cave.

Bats aren’t the only ones to use this trick. A potential prey insect itself, Grote’s bertholdia moth, is also able to jam bat echolocation to protect itself by emitting high-frequency clicks when it senses a bat has zeroed in on them.