.."it waz da bat I tell ya"
Posted on 02/14/2007 9:18:43 AM PST by Pharmboy
Bats, lauded for scooping up mosquitoes and other nasty pests but reviled for drinking blood and spreading rabies, now have another unpopular habit to live down -- it appears they eat songbirds, scientists said on Tuesday.
Spanish and Swiss researchers said they had nailed down controversial evidence that one large species of bat preys on little birds as they migrate through the dark of night over the Mediterranean.
They said giant noctule bats, large bats with an 18-inch (45-centimetre) wingspan, were eating mostly insects during the spring but appeared to have a diet heavy in bird meat during the autumn.
No other animal preys on birds that migrate at night, and this species of bat may have switched to this abundant food source recently, they reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.
"In the course of a few million years, bats colonized most ecological niches and learned to exploit a wide array of food sources including arthropods, pollen, fruit, small terrestrial vertebrates and even blood," Ana Popa-Lisseanu and Carlos Ibanez of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas in Seville, Spain, and colleagues wrote.
Researchers on the team had earlier reported finding bird feathers in the feces of the bats, creating a storm of controversy, with some biologists saying the bats must have accidentally eaten feathers floating in the air.
So the Swiss and Spanish researchers decided to look for more direct evidence. It is hard to tell what is going on in the middle of the night high in the air over the sea, so they analyzed the blood of the bats.
Chemical variants called isotopes can tell what an animal has been eating and carbon and nitrogen isotopes are especially useful for pinpointing the sources of a diet.
The researchers tested the blood of the bats throughout the year and found strong evidence that the flying mammals ate only insects in the summer, ate a few songbirds in the spring, and then preyed heavily on birds in the autumn.
This could be because both parents and their naive young migrate from Africa back to Europe in the autumn, the researchers said.
"Every year, approximately five billion passerines (songbirds) cross the Mediterranean basin during their autumn migrations," the Ibanez team wrote in their report.
"A big proportion of them are small-sized; as an example, more than 90 percent of migrating passerines mist-netted in the study area have an average body mass of less than 20 g (0.8 ounces). They thus represent a multitude of potential hunting targets for a large bat like Nyctalus lasiopterus."
The ability of giant noctule bats to catch migrating birds while they fly at night appears to be unique, Ibanez and colleagues said.
"So far, no predator had been reported to exploit this extraordinarily diverse and abundant food reservoir represented by nocturnally migrating passerines," they wrote.
But seriously folks, someone please call PETA.
Maybe they can eat those "mafia warblers," which force even smaller songbirds to raise their young.
Bats eat birds? Does this explain Batman and Robin being ambiguously gay duo?
Do they taste like chicken? Ah, the birds, I mean.
.."it waz da bat I tell ya"
Are they eating bird eggs?? That could account for NEST feathers. Do bats chew or suck??
"They said giant noctule bats, large bats with an 18-inch (45-centimetre) wingspan"
The reporter must have one of those Penthouse rulers.
"Birds are YUMMY!"
...mmmm, protein...
BTW, are those ticks or nipples on the squirrel's chest?
Someone had posted an image of a squirrel eating a sparrow or chickadee ages ago; flipped me right out!
Don't know what's on its chest... I imagine if they were ticks, the squirrel would chew them out.
Maybe not. Tick bites are painless. The only way to know that one's there is to see it or feel the body.
The gray squirrels diet consists of nuts, seeds and fruit. It will eat bird eggs, bugs, and even an animal carcass if there is no other food source available.
Try this on for size... http://www.superdickery.com/galleries.html
I don't believe this. You would have feral cat packs running loose all over the place looking for a cheap meal of birds and bats. That's not happening.
I saw bats in Spain and they usually nest near farms. Far above or far away from anything that moves that's even close to their size. They can ruin crops. There are exterminators for bat nests. Especially if you see them buzzing a nest when the sun is at high noon. That is typically rabies from a bad little mouse tapas dinner.
That's all. Just tell your cat to hunt flying mice. It would test Sonar vs Night Vision. Cats never get stubbed toes for a reason.
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