It’s just 13 genes that distinguish vampire bats or ‘bloodsuckers’ from small flying mammals that are more likely to eat fruit or small insects.. The loss of this genetic pool – or its no longer functioning – allows them to survive in the way that only a few organisms on earth can: on blood. Their bodies are designed to survive on a diet rich in iron and protein but with minimal amounts of fat or carbohydrates. This was discovered by an international group of scientists who published this latest finding in the journalism. Science Advances.
Although “blood is a terrible food source”, most mammals cannot survive on liquid blood alone. It’s low in calories, explains Hannah Kim Frank, a bat researcher at Tulane University. It is therefore “strange” that these bats were able to survive. Unusual even for its kind.
Of the 1,400 bat species, only three survive by sucking the blood of their victims.; the rest mostly eat insects, fruit, nectar, pollen or meat such as small frogs and fish. These three species are common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), hairy-footed vampireDiphylla ecaudata), and the white-winged vampire (young diaemus). These bats live in South and Central America and have a length of about 8 centimeters and a wingspan of 18 centimeters.
100 samples suck the blood of 25 cows in one year
Bats come out of their caves at night to feed on blood and bite and then lick the blood of cattle or other animals. During the day, they sleep in total darkness, hanging upside down, and in colonies of about 100 individuals, although they sometimes live in groups of more than a thousand. A colony of 100 vampires a year can drink the blood of 25 cows.. Their preferred prey is usually cattle and wild ungulates and chickens. They rarely attack dogs and humans.
Vampire bats approach their victims from the ground. They roost near their prey and approach it by walking on all fours. They have few teeth due to their liquid diet, but very few teeth they have are sharp. Each bat has a thermal sensor on its nose that guides it to a spot under its victim’s skin where warm blood flows. After the vampire bat bites the animal, it sucks the blood with its tongue. Their saliva prevents blood from clotting.
With such a low-calorie diet, vampire bats cannot survive very long without food. How do they live in the community? When one of them is in trouble, the better-fed members vomit up their food to share with a hungry neighbor.
The moment is crucial, and in order to perform altruistic action of this caliber, bats search their memory to see if the distressed has helped them in the past. Co-author Michael Hiller of the Max Planck Institute in Germany insists that these organisms have “complex social relationships,” “It’s like they’re watching,” he says. This behavior has nothing to do with kinship. People identify whether the person they are helping has shared with others before. If so, reward them.
In a previous study by a team from the University of Illinois and Ohio University, it was discovered that precisely because of this unusual interaction, members of the same colony share their gut microbiota with other members of the swarm. In this study, the researchers came to the following conclusion: These animals are very social. Not only do they live close to each other, they also interact and groom each other.
The researchers found that the gut biomes of members of one bat colony were more similar to one another than those living in another colony. Bats that were particularly close together in a colony had more similar gut biomes than other members of the same colony.
Reference works: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm6494 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0476-8