Despite keeping mosquito populations down and helping to pollinate more than 700 different crops, bats in general get a pretty bad rap — though it’s tough to say if seeing one running helps or hinders that perception.
Dr. Giulia Rossi of Canada’s McMaster University was part of a team that recently made headlines the world over, for discovering just how vampire bats take a diet of nothing but blood, and manage to, literally, run with it.
“The diversity is remarkable,” she said. “You’ve got nectar-feeders, fruit-eating bats, all sorts of different species there.”
The “there” in question was a field station in Belize, where the research team flew to sate their curiosity. The grounds of Lamanai Archaeological Reserve provided quite an opportunity.
“We caught, I think, over 1000 bats in the two weeks that we were there, but only a handful of them were vampires,” said Dr. Rossi.
She worked in tandem with Dr. Ken Welch, who has done extensive research on how hummingbirds survive almost exclusively on nectar, and parlayed that to an animal that survives on blood. But, how do you figure out what’s really fueling these critters? Call it a “bat breathalyzer” of sorts, measuring the ratio between the oxygen they take in, and the CO₂ they breathe out.
“Can we figure out if they’re using protein based on that ratio, between oxygen consumed and CO₂ produced? You need to have an enclosed treadmill where you can carefully monitor oxygen and carbon dioxide levels within,” said Dr. Rossi.
Not even your everyday bat researcher has a tiny treadmill lying around, so the team had one custom-built from a company that provides them for mice.
“We said, ‘Hey, we need something a little bigger… maybe something you would use on rats,’ said Dr. Rossi. ”From there, they prototyped a rat treadmill, knowing we would be using it for running vampire bats.”
The bats took to their exercise regimen with little delay after being fed cow’s blood.
“Often with science, there’s a lot of troubleshooting that goes on, but much to our surprise, it worked really well the first time,” said Dr. Rossi.
Top speeds came in at 30 meters a minute, or two kilometers an hour, with little hops helping them along. For a proportional comparison, it’s around the equivalent of a six-foot-tall human running at 12 km/h.
The team successfully proved these bats were using the amino acids in cow’s blood as the main fuel for their movement, mere minutes after being fed. Dr. Rossi says this quick metabolism and odd technique of legs over wings can help them survive in the wild.
“They use this sort of running to follow prey at night, or land close to them then sneak up on them a little quieter than if you were to just fly down and land on its shoulder,” she said.
For her part, Dr. Rossi says the results were almost immediate, with the team adhering to ethical practices and not putting these bats through much higher a pace than they would run in bursts in the wild. She hopes others can gather more field research on this batty breakthrough.
“It’s always nice when you have the data to support your hypothesis and confirm something that you think is really interesting,” said Dr. Rossi.
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