Southeast Asian clearwing moths buzz like their model bees

BACKGROUND: The endless struggle to survive has driven harmless species to evolve elaborate strategies of deceiving predators. Batesian mimicry involves imitations of noxious species’ warning signals by palatable mimics. Clearwing moths (Lepidoptera: Sesiidae), incapable of inflicting painful bites or stings, resemble bees or wasps in their morphology and sometimes imitate their behaviours. An entirely unexplored type of deception in sesiids is acoustic mimicry. We recorded the buzzing sounds of two species of Southeast Asian clearwing moths, Heterosphecia pahangensis and H. hyaloptera and compared them to their visual model bee, Tetragonilla collina, and two control species of bees occurring in the same habitat. Recordings were performed on untethered, flying insects in nature. RESULTS: Based on eight acoustic parameters and wingbeat frequencies calculated from slow-motion videos, we found that the buzzes produced by both clearwing moths highly resemble those of T. collina but differ from the two control species of bees. CONCLUSIONS: Acoustic similarities to bees, alongside morphological and behavioural imitations, indicate that clearwing moths display multimodal mimicry of their evolutionary models. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12983-021-00419-8.