ABOVE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, MATHKNIGHT
Vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), whose diet consists entirely of the blood of other animals, often struggle to drink enough blood each night and can miss meals, reports Science News. If they don’t get enough blood for three straight days, they can die, but social bonds between the bats help them get enough food. Some bats regurgitate part of their blood meal to feed others. Researchers have found that these bonds can persist in bats that are captured and later released into the wild, according to a study published yesterday (October 31) in Current Biology.
Gerald Carter, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University and a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and his team caught 17 wild bats from the same colony and kept them in captivity for nearly two years. During this time, the researchers observed that some bats formed social bonds by ...
