Rise of the Vampire Bat

various fantasy elements. They're like, that's completely overblown, to the point that most people I think are getting, if not completely already forward with vampires, you know, we kind of know what to expand with it. And then with vampire bats, I don't want to, you know, discredit them either, but on a at a surface level, it's easy to say, oh, well, their bats and they drink blood from cows, no big deal.

I've seen them on I've seen Attenborough talk about them on documentaries, and yes, they're they're neat, but I don't necessarily need to hear about them for an hour. But the thing is, we really start asking questions about the blood diet and about the vampiric lifestyle style and how that evolved really get into some crazy imaginative areas that that that that really blew my mind. Yeah, these guys are so interesting for for many many reasons. And we've

talked about bats. I think we had a couple of bad episodes last year. Maybe we've talked about how um, we'll just we'll discuss a little bit about this, but we've talked about how they have rich social bonds and they are amazing creatures, and they have these these four limbs. If you look at their bodies, it's very easy to see the human hand and the human armbones replicated in that wingspan. That alone gives us this idea that there's so much to this mammal that's only flying mammal um

that relates to us. And then there's the weirdness of the blood diet too. So let's let's launch into these guys because they're so amazing. Yeah, vampire bats. Now, bats exist in various places throughout the world. We have both both the Old World and the New World bats, the

New World of course being the America's. But out of all these species and uh, and we're talking over a thousand, like five more or less different species of bats in the world, they make up a quarter of all mammal species, and yet vampire bats limited to three species currently, all three live in the New World in the America's ranging from Mexico to Brazil, Chile and argat Argentina. And there's a reason for that. Yes, we'll get into that in

a little bit. But when we're talking about these three species, we were talking about does modest rotundus, diphilia eco data and Diningma's jungi and respectively, were talking about the common vampire, the hairy legged vampire, and the white winged vampire. Yes, and these are all three again their vampires their single bars. They live which in their obligates obligates samla single bars, meaning they live exclusively on blood. There are obligated to

drink it. It's not just a situation of like, yeah, I eat blood, eat bugs and then I get a little blood here and there. No, they exist solely on blood. And as will discuss, like that's that's a hard road, like blood is not a great nutrient. Like if you had to choose one thing in the world to live upon, that's not a good choice. Like that's why you have that's really one of the reasons you have only three species out of these thousands of species of bats that

do this. The rest are living on fruits or insects. And then here these these guys and gals, and they're depending upon blood. Yeah, in a pretty limited region if you look at it from a world perspective. Um, but let's look at the way these guys appear to us,

because they're they're quite striking. Um. They have these pig like noses that if you ever look at angry birds and you see the pigs, they've got big gizmo ears, right, and um, they have a kind of a it's been described as a cleft on its chin which helps to channel the blood. And then of course these just razor sharp teeth. Yeah. And the and the nose you mentioned is all. They also have this this kind of nose leafing it's called, which almost kind of makes their nose

looks like some sort of a fungus. Uh. And and you find these all in other bats as well, not just the vampire bats. But they give the the vampire

about a very distinct appearance. And in fact, early naturalist thought, you know, I guess, based mostly on illustrations at this point that those leaves might be sharp, so their noses are kind of these these razor blades that they might be using to slice open their prey in order to drink the blood, which isn't so then the nose leaves have have to do with echolocation and also thermal location, not only seeing things with sight, but also detecting changes

in temperature so they can see where that blood is to see where see where where to strike, and where to drink exactly. They actually it's sort of like an infrared system that can actually sense that heat. But um. But what I love about the way they look and these depictions of them is they almost look like these fictional like medieval etchings or something or something that would come out of the mind of man, because they look

so bizarre they do. They have this goblin the UH look to them, and it's right because you you look at the illustrations of fantastic goblins and whatnot and monsters and demons, and then you look at the bat, and then you have to know what comes first. You know, to what extent has the bat influenced our iconography of the monstrous? To what extent has the monstrous UH interpreted our interpretation of the bat, because for instance, the vampire thing,

it really our understanding of the vampire bat is fairly recent. Uh. And again they're in there in the New World, they're in the Americas. But the idea of the vampire, of some sort of creature that sustains itself on blood, on human blood, especially, like, that's a very old idea that you find, uh, you know, back in even in the Hellenistic ages, and perhaps you know even earlier indeed. But let's let's get into some of their feeding habits, because

this is really interesting stuff. In a study published in the journal BMC Biology, it was found that vampire bats of this species does modus rotundus by the way, if they were named rotundus at the time, because their stomachs looked appear to the people it is very very large to the researchers, um. But little did they know that the stomach was actually filled with blood at that moment,

so that's why the stomach looked so rotund. But they found that these bats could recognize recorded human breathing sounds much better than human participants could. And vampire bats feed on the same prey, by the way, over several nights and the authors of the study proposed that the bats us breathing sounds to identify prey in the same way

um humans use voice to recognize each other. So it's kind of it's interesting not only that they have the certain live stock in mind, but they can differentiate between that live stock based on their breathing patterns. And we've talked about this ability with bats before, this sort of zen like ability just to to take everything else in the background and have it sort of receeed and really

hone in on the prey. Yeah, they're amazing creatures and and it's easy to focus on on all of this, uh, the alien aspects of the bat, because as we discussed in the previous podcast, it's it's it's almost impossible to put ourselves in that perspective and to imagine seeing the world as the bat sees the world. But they're also really social creatures. They typically gather in collegues about a hundred animals, but sometimes they meant living may live in

a group of a thousand or more. And uh, incidentally, over that time, a hundred bat colony can drink the blood of twenty five cows. But but again, they're they're very social. You see actual um reciprocal altruism in vampire bats. You see, because this will discuss, it's essential with with a blood diet to to get that blood every night if possible. And if you go forty eight hours without

blood as a vampire bat, you're starving yet your toast. Yeah, and so we we we see examples of the vampi of vampire bats bringing blood back and feeding the famished bats, the bats that haven't had enough to eat, and and

looking after each other in this in this fashion. And that one of the theories here with this is that bats picked up this behavior, this kind of altruism, is looking after one another because in their habitats, as you see the horse die aways, you see the camel and the giant slop disappear from the continent, leaving them only uh, you know, much more limited food supplies. They had to do this in order to survive. Yeah, there's a kind

of cooperation, just like among humans. Right. If you kind of help me out this time, I'll help you out next time. You know, you can't find a source of blood, right there, there's what I said yesterday, right exactly. Yeah, And there's they're they're even you know, there's some degree of of argument uh in this on this particular topic among bat researchers. But they may be able to weed out cheats. So if you're taking blood but not giving,

then they're going to cut you off. Ah, that's interesting. And they have seen that in captivity all of the bats will share a meal if if someone needs it, but in their natural habitat the adult males will not engage in this behavior the female as well. Of course, they also like to sniff each other as a greeting and they perform social grooming of one another, which is key. We'll be getting back to that in a minute. Yeah, And for their body size, vampire bats have one of

the largest brains among bats. The neo cortex is about twice the average size of other bats. And as we know about the neo cortex and humans, it's really important in terms of social intelligence and social complexity. So it would make sense that um it is so very large. And if they have these very rich bonds with one another. And we have talked about this before and the other podcast about bad but a lot of the test to do with their communication, which is super nuanced. We know

of course they can recognize each other's voices. We also know that bats share a common gene for communication called fox P two with us. And we also known, according to researcher Mere Jean Quinn Child and her colleagues at the University of Erlingen Nuremberg in Germany, that the younger great greater sack bats that the baby ones were observed stringing together screeches, barks, and hisses with no soccial context,

essentially practicing language much like a toddler does when it babbles. Yeah, so again, you see a lot of parallels with humans. All right, So let's talk about evolution. Now, mostly we're interested in the evolution of of vampiresm of depending upon that blood diet. But but let's let's step it out a little, uh, a little more and think about the evolution of the bat itself. Bats and birds. Obviously they have a great deal in common. Both both are flying organisms,

yet they're very different. In birds, we have the aviens emerging about a hundred and fifty million years ago during the Jurassic period, uh, and they go on from there to fly, swim, trott and borrow all over the world. Meanwhile, uh, the mammalion bat dates back between seventy hundred million years ago. But it's hard to say because even though they're one of the most diverse groups of mammals today, they're one

of the least common groups in the fossil records. Uh. Part of this is that they have small light skeletons, they don't preserve all that well. And also, if you're residing in a tropical environment, as a lot of these these bats due today and and did historically, these are not environments where where dead things last long decomposition is yeah, things that it's breaking down, it's hot, it's moist, things are eating. Uh, so it's chance the chances of fossilization

are reduced. Again. They're over a thousand different species of bats in the world. They make up a quarter of all mammal species. Uh. And among these we have the mega bats as opposed to the microbats. These are large bats found in the Old World tropical rainforests Australia, Asia, and Africa. The biggest bat in the world is the is the Malayan flying fox found in Asia. Waighs about two pounds and has a wingspan a fan of about

six feet, and that's one of the fruit eaters. The smallest bat in the world is Kitty's hog nose bat, also called the bumblebee bat, and that's stuff found in Thai land in ways about two grams uh. It's about as much as a dime, by the way, and it has a six inch wingspan. So both the bat and the bird learned to fly in their own way. And

there are other fascinating examples of their covergent evolution. Several dozen bat species and more than three hundred species of hummingbird evolved to resemble each other, both anatomically and behaviorally, uh, solely because they existed in similar environments and exploited a similar resource name lamely nectar. All right, this is the sugary liquid bribe of pollen producing plants. But those are the nectivores. And we're here to talk about bats with

another highly specialized lifestyle for a liquid diet. And we're talking here, of course about the songlevores, the blood drinkers. How did the blood drinkers evolve? Well, the first vampire bats emerged less than twenty six million years ago, according to genetic evidence, and they are closely related to insect eating bats that may have gorged on the parasites of

prehistoric beasts. So if you've just feasted on a fat, juicy tick, let's say, then it's not too far of a walk in logic to see how some bats may have begun to have the taste for blood or to seek it out as as a mean source. Right, And we we see this to a certain degree in birds. Uh, there are birds that occasionally or even frequently feed on blood. Vampire finches of the Glagos Islands occasionally feed by drinking

the blood of other birds. Meanwhile, there are plenty of birds that feed on picks and other parasites and large animals, you know, ox peckers and the like. They're eating the ticks, they're eating the fleas, whatever. And then if there's a little blood there from the host organism, they'll they'll go ahead and cross that line and have some of it as well. But there's little or no convergence between birds

and bats when it comes to blood. When we're talking about obligate blood drinking, you don't see uh, any obligate blood drinking birds. Well, I think imagine the pigeons out there, so so central are these blood meals to the vampire bats that they actually have been missing around or modifying a plasma gen activator gene, which we haven't. Humans have it, and it protects against heart attack by producing proteins that

bust up blood clots and they clear vessels. Um. But they actually have this, uh, this gene that they can activate in their saliva. And David Liberles, a geneticist at the University of Wyoming and Laramie, studied three species of vampire bouts and found this modification. And he found that two species that prey on lifestock acquired additional mutations that prevent these p A proteins from being silenced by natural inhibitor.

So he says that's a process that humans and other mammals used to put a harness on blood clotting, but feeding on mammals, he says, is a key adaptation for that. So it's just further evidence that this is so important to them that they've been tinkering over time their genes say hey, we need to make this process more solid. Yeah, like thet a genetic level, they are completely committed to this blood diet and we're going to get into into

some more aspects of this little more. But it's such a specialized diet that it demands a very specialized physiology. It's not. And that's something to keep in mind again when you think of of humanoid vampires, like, what would it take for a human? Could a human live on blood exclusively? No, a human couldn't. It would require a different species of humanoid exactly entirely. Yeah, you'd have to

be a very tiny humanoid first of all. Um. But I did want a little side note here mentioned that the anticoagulating enzyme that they produce has been synthathesized by researchers and it is called draculin. Nice. It isn't that nice, And it's used in medication for strict victims to keep tissue damage and a minimum by keeping that blood flow to the tissues. Yeah, like we discussed when we were talking about leeches, I believe any animal that that depends

on blood has to be kind of a hacker. And the and the the bat though it's hard to call about a parasite. You see people shying away from them as bat and calling them a carnivore, but still they have to be able to hack the blood. And so from a medical standpoint, as we try to figure out ways to hack the blood, we end up turning to the to the leeches, to the bats, the parasites of the world, to the blood drinkers of the world, and

see how they do it. Um. You mentioned the evolution of the bat and the idea that they evolved from insect eating bats in prehistory, and I just wanted to run through UM that that that idea because it gave me some visual old, didn't it It did? And uh And specifically I was reading a fantastic book and you were reading this as well, by Bill Shoot called Dark Banquet,

Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures. It's available on paperback, hardcover, and kindle, and it's it's really excellent, excellently written, great for just about any any reading level, in any science level. UM. But he really goes into this topic and I was. I really enjoyed it so much I wanted to hit the three uh or so hypotheses that he mentions. Now, the first hypothesis is, again, we have these proto vampire bats and they're feeding on

blood in gorge ectoparasites found on large prehistoric animals. So think of all those crazy prehistoric animals that we covered in the past. Or you send pictures of um and there, and there of course loaded with parasites, big old ticks, big old fleas, other things that are gorging on the blood. Yeah, it's a feast. And you're a bat, you're you're you eat insects, and it's a world in which the insects are are the available prey. And here is a large

animal and it's crawling with these things. So you're you're gonna you're gonna eat those, right, You're gonna eat those big blood gorge ticks and whatnot. And so that the idea here is that they're dining on those and over time they crossed the line, you know, they start drinking some blood from the host, and then they reached the point where they're living exclusively on the blood of the host animal and ignoring all of those ticks and fleets. Now, this is supported by the fact as a theory, as

a hypothesis, rather that bats are insectivore. So we know that that prehistoric bats would have been eating insects, and there are anecdotal reports of vampire bats praying on vampire moths. Now, just that's gonna come as a surprise for a lot of you, because yes, there is a vampire moth um blood on blood here, yeah, and you'll find him in Malaysia, you'll find him in Thailand. You're all southern Europe and

and so there. Again, there's anecdotal evidence that vampire bats have preyed on blood engorged insects, So take that point. It's another scenario that lends support to this idea. Is the whole grimming thing, right, you had pointed that out. That's that's important socially that you sit there and groom each other. So that would be an opportunity to pick out some nice, juicy morsels, right, That's so that could lend some support to it. And I said that it was a sort of short walk in logic to say

you would cross over. But that's also a little simplistic, right, because that's like saying that if you had to be a cannibal in this very dire situation as a human being, that once you had that, you might go cannibal for

the rest of your life, right right. Yeah. We find it increasingly when you try and apply some sort of mathematical model for evolution, if you fall into this trap here, because it's not a situation able X plus y equals z here so it must be the same here, and it gets gets complex anyway, Um that expert brock Fenton disagrees with this, uh, this theory that we've been discussing,

and he argues on some three points. Number one, ectoparasites are small, Like even if we're talking about a prehistoric animal, it's it's still gonna have small parasites. It's not like the giant elephant head giant ticks. So let's take like thousands of these things. Yeah, you still a lot of them, and it's gonna be difficult to act. The ectoparasites are difficult to find on other animals, and vampire bats are

restricted to a very slim portion of the Americans. And so part of his argument is, if this was really how things were gonna go down, why didn't it go down like this in other places? So he presents hypothesis number two, the idea that proto vampire bats fed on insects and larva crawling around the gaping wounds of large prehistoric mammals. So, which is another wondrously grotesque image to imagine a giant prehistoric creature. It's, you know, it's shambling

through the forest. Maybe it's something that attacked it, had got into a fight, or it just ripped itself on some thorns, just got this bleeding hole. So what happens to a bleeding hole on an animal? Insects come for it, right, things start laying their squirming larvae in there, and uh. And so a bat might come and say, well, hey, I want to hang out where all these delicious insects are hanging out. And then they end up inevitably drinking from that font as well, which again is kind of

too easy to walk here. Yeah. Shoot. In his book Counters, he says that the scenario requires large wound sits on a regular basis um and uh. And also, as we're gonna get into a little later, vampire invertebrate blood is water and protein. There's no fat, so vampire bats can't store it as fat like non blood drinking bats store away their their their food. Uh. They need to feed and consume fifty of their body weight and blood each night.

So you need to be able to find if you're depending upon wounds, uh, surrounded by insects, you've gotta be able to find those wounds surrounded by insects on a regular basis basis, and also echolocation is gonna be useless in finding these animals. Um It's it's just that there

are a number of holes in this argument as well. Now, a third hypothesis here is something called the arboreal feeding hypothesis, and it really focuses on carnivorous members of the neotropical bat family Philisto muda i found in South America where formerly there had been vast forests which were then replaced

by grasslands. So what does that mean. That means that all of a sudden you have very small little islands of forest area, and you have a lot of big mammals taking refuge in these trees, sleeping in them at night, and so all of a sudden you've got a population of one tree that might be hosting many different hosts um as opposed to being spread out through the forest.

And this is an opportunity for vampire bats. So what you're talking about here is a bunch of animals like sloth taking refuge in these trees, falling asleep, and then these vampire bats, who are so stealthy by the way, sneaking up and just saying well you don't mind if I do, and taking their blood samples there, and then of course this would encourage that behavior over and again

as an adaptation in this scenario. Because if you've got that loss of habitat, and all of a sudden you've got these mammals congregated in the trees, well that makes easy pickings. So which hypothesis is true? Well, the answer still open to debate. Uh. That you know, it's possible. As with a lot of things, it's more of a combination of these ideas as opposed to one distinct idea. And uh, and we have to remember that it's it's it's it's difficult to avoid falling into the trap of

thinking of evolution as this clockwork predictable scenario. Again, if it's X here, then it's X there. Uh. If we turn back the clock and did it again, everything would come back to the same place that we get the same results. And that's that's likely not how it goes. Um For whatever reason, a single group of New World leaf nose bats evolved as the only vertebrate obligate sangle bores. And it's pretty amazing. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back, we're gonna talk more

about the hard knock life and uh blood letting. All right, we're back. Let's talk about these vampire bouts because if you made it this far in the Vampire About Territory, you're about to get this serious blood payoff. Because this is fascinating stuff. And uh, maybe we should start this section as like, you imagine you are the vampire bout, dear listener. Yeah, I imagine that you have sort of

gone down this uh almost evolution. I wouldn't almost say an evolutionary dead end, but you've you've gone down far enough that you're you're in this very niche area and there's no there's no turning back. It's like that line in Macbeth where Shakespeare says, you know, if I've waited that the main character says, I've waded through blood so far that if I were to turn back, it would be just as much work to keep going. And that's

where the vampire bad is. It's a hard knock life that the vampire back has evolved into, but there's no turning and turning back at least not anytime soon, that's right. So you are stuck with this blood diet and the bad news here is again and We've talked about it before. Blood just doesn't have much to it in terms of nutrients. In fact, a percent of it is water. So what do you have to do Every night? You must go out and hunt and lap up of your body weight.

And this is this is a hard thing to do because you can't store any fat that it might have because it doesn't have any fats. So you every night are obligated to go out. You can't sleep it off, you know. You Also you can't hybrid it. You can't build up stores for later. You're there's no uh, there's no preparing for the winter. If winter comes, you're you're gone if you can't get blood. So and that's why we see these three species of vampire bats living in

tropical areas. They cannot knack it in areas that have cold climates. So that's right, you cannot hack the cold weather. You have to take advantage of these areas that have warmer web other and you must be really wildly. So it's not just like, hey, I gotta go out and get some blood. No, you're gonna be the best at getting blood. Is any blood getting mammal is gonna get. Yeah, you've got to use your stealth to the highest degree

because you need to prey on sweeping animals. You need to not wake them up while you're drinking their blood. And you can't exert a tremendous amount of effort and energy finding your prey because again you're you're you're on a very tight budget here. You have to eat every night, and you can't spend too much energy because you can't store that much energy. So you can't go on long drawn old hunts covering you know, vast miles of of area.

You have to you have to really hone in. You gotta make it work, and you've got to You've gotta get defeating, that's right. And so as a result, you have this exquisitely sensitive heat detecting molecule covering nerve ending on your nose, and this allows you to detect infrared heat that is just beaming from areas on a livestock's body and and that that's sort of like the the area that you know you're going to hone in on, because as you said, you don't have tons of energy here.

You gotta be fast. Yeah, you gotta go right for the vein. There's no just crawling around on it's romp until you find an area that's that's that's right. You can't feel it out, you gotta see it. You gotta focus in on it, and luckily the vampire back can douce that. Yeah, and these guys that mostly attack from ground, though sometimes it's from the trees, but they can actually run. It's only like two point five miles per hour or something,

but still that's pretty fast, and that they think. The reason for that, researchers think, uh, is because if they're around something like a horse or a cow, it's easy to get trampled upon, So you gotta get out of their fashion. Good people to hop away. But it's pretty amazing to see them running, all right. See you land next to the cow. You hit the ground running more or less than you you you scamper up there right to the place that that hot spot that you've you've

seen with your your your fantastic heat vision. And this is where you're gonna feed. What do you do? Well, first thing you do is you lick that area where where you're gonna apply the incision the saliva anticoagulants. Yes, because the saliva here is key and is really amazing to quote Bill Shoot from his book Dark Banquet, the process actually consists of a maddening cascade of chemical reactions

that must occur before clot forms. Because again, you're making when you make your incision now with your your sharp teeth, you're making a very small wound. You're not just you know, you're not making this enormous font from which to drink. You're making something that giving its own devices, given the body's own defenses, this would normally close up in a couple of minutes. This is not You're not just you know,

opening a jugular here and dancing around the fountain. You're creating a small wound, but anticoagulants in the blood prevented from clotting, allowing you to feed there for the amount of time necessary to get that full meal. Yeah, in this case about minutes. And if you think about their incisors, they are knife sharp um. In fact, Bruce Patterson, a zoologists at Field Museum in Chicago, says, you can actually cut yourself handling a bat skull in a museum. They're

that sharp. Because again we're talking about efficiency here, getting in and getting in quick, and their tongues also get into the game here because they contain a specialized groove that allows a blood meal to flow via capillary action. So they do not suck, they slurp, They lap up, which is another thing to keep in mind because again it's it's a small wound. It's not going to be

held open by suction. And uh and to your point about the teeth, that's another aspect of this too, is that it's such a small cut in with such a sharp knife you barely feel it while you're sleeping. UM. In his book, Bill Shoot talks about an encounter with a bat and a hen that had him reeling. And I love this, you know what I'm talking about. So

I was thinking about this. Not only does the bat have data from UM from the infrared molecule and data from the breathing pattern of the livestock, but also has been observing it and perhaps taking those observations and passing them down among its young and so on and so forth. And what I mean is that Bill Shoot saw this

bat sidle up to a hen. Thought the hen was going to be like, no way getaway, but it did not, because the bat then went and cuddled up to the hen right at this area it's called UM I think it's called a brood patch. It's where chicks will go because there's more heat and more capillaries that are congregated there, so there's more heat available. So essentially, this bat is

mimicking a chick and cozing up with the hen. And what he said is that he saw the hen like visibly looked to be relaxed and then settled down, and then the bat kind of burrowed down a little bit more, and a couple of minutes later he saw evidence of that blood from underneath the hen where that bat had been suckling a the vein. I mean, I think it's amazing that essentially said hello, hen, I know I look like a bat, but really I'm a sweet little chick

who just needs a little warmth. That is amazing. Now you mentioned the tongue earlier, and the tongue is also really key here. Again, the bat is not sucking the blood. It's it's lapping the blood. But but lapping. It's easy to just say, oh, lapping and just sort of have this loose idea in your mind of a dog or a cat lapping up the milk or water, which even that, incidentally, if you slow it down and look at the video is a far more complicated process than we than we

give the credit. With the bat, you have this piston like motion of the tongue and it causes the blood to flow along a pair of grooves on the bottom of the tug and into the mouth through that cleft in the lower lip that we mentioned earlier. So you have to imagine that again. It's like this piston action of the tongue just and you get this flow going out of the wound into the bat's mouth. Yeah, we're talking about a tablespoon when it's all um done. But again,

that's half of the bat's body weight. So after it leaves the tongue, it goes into the esophagus and down into the stomach, which is richly lined with blood vessels that absorb that water and that shunts it straight to the kidneys before it actually goes to the intestines. So that something is really important here because it is absorbing all of that water. But the reason is is because they have to work fast, these bats in terms of

digesting and expelling this stuff from their systems. Yeah, again, they're loading up on blood and they have to be ready to escape at a moment's notice, you know that cow might wake up, uh anything at any time, and you're gonna have to get away. You're gonna have to then fly away. And you cannot be weighted down with all of this waterway because again we're talking about just just consuming you know, half your body weight and food and you're and you're gonna have that that stomach just

filled with water. So you've got to get rid of it. And that's why you have this rapid uh removed oval of the water, shut it through the kidneys. And then the bat vampire bat is urinating as it's feeding, Like shortly after it starts feeding, it starts urinating because it's it has to prepare for takeoff. Yeah, to add insult to injury here, and it avoids soiling itself by extending one hind limb sideways and downward. So it's like, I'm not gonna get on any on me, but hey, you

sorry about that. And it's also an interesting scenario when you start thinking about about the urine itself and it has to the urine that the bat is pumping out is getting increasingly concentrated as it goes. Because part of the whole deal with our urine. Of course, we're getting rid of these toxic aspects of our meal and uh,

and that's what the bat is doing as well. But it's doing in such a such a such a fast process at play here that you just have the concentration of the urine is just building up and building up

the more that it urinates. And you get into this interesting area here too, where despite the fact that the vampire bat has this this liquid diet, and despite the fact that it lives in the tropics exclusively, it lives in its own kind of personal physiological desert, there's always this risk of dehydration because it has to get rid of so much of the water that it consumes through its meals. That that that that again factors into the

economy of the vampire bat. It can't it can't live in a place where it's any kind of dryness, because it does it it's living, it's living with such a slim margin um between it's it's it's life and complete dehydration. Yeah, that's a that's a really complex balancing game there, And I think it speaks again to this idea, or at least in my head, that they almants feel like they're cursed in a sense like in and of course I'm evoking uh, vampire lore here, but you know you can't.

You can't hibernate. You have to live in this very specific area, um and kind after night you must go out and kill, well not the kill perpect blood. One thing that makes me think about you. You've done freelance work, of course, freelance writing, uh and I have as well. And at times you do you like like like myself, You've probably ticket You've thought yourself, well, could I just depend up solely on freelance writing? And I feel like it.

You end up getting into this sort of vampire bat situation where you're like, yes, if I, if I pray, if I get enough gigs on a regular basis in the in the just the right environment, and I never sleep, never hibernate, then I can make it work. I can just barely make it work, and I can survive and

and and pay all my bills. And then you end up just defecating and urinating on yourself all the time to avoid having to deal with any loss of energy, right, and you're always looking for that that next that next kill, that next job. Yeah, it is. It's kind of I like that analogy. Yeah, the vampire bat is living on the margins here, you know, it's just it's it's it's found this niche. But it is a hard niche to

exist in. Indeed, it is. I want to point out that we do have a few fossil vampire bats, including the biggest vampire bat that that ever existed as far as we can tell from the fossil record, and that's the thirty percent larger uh do Modus dracula, which is of course a great great name for a vampire bat or some sort of a you know, Gothic band uh

And they were they were total vampires. They were not any kind of transitional form, and they existed farther up into the America's But the idea is, this larger bat is depending on the blood of larger species, and if those species died out in these sorry times, so did this And so the domain of the vampire bat was once larger and contained more species than it shrinks. And it's then it's confined to these these hot tropical zones and the few animals that they can still prey on

for blood. Ah. But what of global warming, which is actually warming up many parts of the world, and this has led some people to say, hey, we think that there is going to be an increase in the vampire bat population, specifically in North America, in Texas and some parts of Louisiana in the next couple of decades, so

they might be coming to a city near you. Yes, all right, so, um, we've given you guys a description of these bats, but if you would like to see them specifically on a vamp cam, you can at this very moment. In fact, there's a there's a camera in there twenty four hours a day you can observe these and this is at the Organization for Bat Conservation, So that's bad Conservation dot Org. Yeah. I was looking at the other day and they're they're really adorable where they're

scurrying around. That's the thing about the vampire bad It's like part of this responds to them, and we with this, uh this something kind of cute about them, But then there's also something that in the very depth of our genes we we can't help but find a repugnant. They walk that line. Well, the distance though of the vamp cam makes it all sorts of adorable. Sure, like my hand's nut in that cage with them, So that's so cute that they're cuddling right now. And it's not full

color either, so it's got that going for it. So there you go, the vampire bat, the evolution of the vampire bat, the physiology of the fampire bat. I I hope it it allows everyone to have even more respect for these amazing creatures and just rethink the vampire equation in general. Like it really made me rethink our ideas of a vampiric human and what that would be like. I feel like we focused, we focus far too much

on the supernatural aspects of of a humanoid vampire. We focus on the viral aspects of like vamp vampirism as a disease in these fantasy and scenarios, and of course we end up fantasizing and focusing on like the sexy and alluring aspect of some sort of a fictional vampire, whereas if we look to the biological example, if we look to the vampire bat, it paints an entirely most entirely different idea about what evampiric human would look like.

I think the closest we've come is the nos Ferato of the classic film and some of the rehashes we've seen, which is kind of like this withered figure. Um, not this robust character wearing shades and a leather jacket and like ruling the night. No, because even the vampire bat does not rule the night. It knows it. I mean, I'm I'm anthromorphizing here. It knows it doesn't rule the night. It has to stick to the shadows as a conservative energy, and it has to get the easiest, uh most filling

meal it can. So the idea of this slim, ghastly corpse like nos Ferato, you know, reeling in the shadows like that's that's I feel like that's the corporate we've we've managed to get. I agree. I wish that Jim Jarmus is a new movie. Only Lovers Left Alive would have explored that idea, would you explored in a blog post by way Um, So check that out af if you want to kind of do some reimagining of Dracula and popular Lure. Yeah, I do want to see Only

Lover's Left Alive. I didn't think that I would want to see another vampire film, but that one looks pretty good. Till the Swinton The Magical unicorn of a human is in it, so you kind of I mean, I have to see it just for that alone. Yeah, I want

to see that. I also want to see Neil Jordan's Byzantium, which sounds in like, on the surface, it sounds like just another scenario of like to two vampires, like a mother and a daughter vampire and they they're, you know, trying to find their way in a world of vampires

living in the shadows. But it's it's misunderstanding each other. Yeah, but it's her mother daughter, but it's it sounds more interesting because it's like strong, supposedly strong female characters based on a play by a female play right, So there's there's something about that that I want to give that one a shot as well. All right, So what about you guys and gals out there, what do you think about the science of a vampire bat the physiology and

evolution of vampire bat um. How does that make you rethink these curious creatures? How does it make you rethink the myth of the vampire as it exists in folklore and in popular culture. Um, we'd love to hear from you, and you can find us at all the normal places there is, of course, Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership that should be your your first stop when you think yourself, I wonder what those guys are up to? Well, go to Stuff to Blow your Mind

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