I've kept rats my whole life and on one hand I'm not surprised, they'll eat what seems like literally anything, on the other hand they seriously pick their battles, a rat isn't going to engage with anything it's unaware of, they have extreme neophobia so I'm somewhat surprised this rat felt the situation out enough that it was comfortable doing this, I'd guess it had spent a lot of time around the bats, also surprising because the rat is a bit on the chonky side to be opportunistically hunting that way. Interesting.
that's not unusual; most rodents do it, and also ants and plecostomuses (although in their cases it may be less out of preference and more due to mouth limitations)
The rats here at Lund University hunt pigeons, friend of a friend took a video of a successful hunt just the other week, totally nuts. They wait in the bushes below the trees on campus, pounce on the pigeons when they land on the ground.
> the rats are effectively as blind as the bat in the dark
Are they? Aren't rats nocturnal in the first place, meaning evolution should have given them some benefit in that environment? AFAIK, rats have pretty OK contrast/motion detection even in low light situations.
I guess if "in the dark" means "low light" or "total darkness". You're probably right for "total darkness" but if it's "low light", I think the rats would "see" better than the bats.
You might be right. The paper mentioned the rats preferred hunting near the light barrier but also mentioned they probably climbed the fabric for an aerial advantage (they didn’t seem to prefer hunting near the light barrier once the fabric was removed).
> The behavior is all the more impressive given that the rodents hunt at night, when they are effectively blind; the rats may rely on their whiskers to detect changes in air currents caused by the bats’ flapping wings.
Bats are one of the largest disease reservoirs on the planet for all kinds nasty novel viruses that could potentially jump to humans.
Bats have crazy immune systems that let them harbor all kinds of nasty stuff without it killing them on account of their unclean communal living habitat. Bats are in close contact where waste and bodily fluids are constantly coming into contact with other members, and these all carry pathogens.
Bat immune systems evolved as a defense mechanism. Bat viral loads are high, and the viruses get to evolve rapidly, come into contact with other virus genomes, and essentially explore the state space of potential virus genomes quickly. Constantly evolving novel glycoproteins, etc. Bats are essentially a virus optimization battleground.
These rats are an invasive species (to the cave) that also live in close proximity to humans. They've just been discovered hunting bats, meaning they're coming into close contact with bat viruses and potentially serving to introduce these into rat and, possibly subsequently, human populations.
Additionally, if the viruses can jump to rats, they're in a state where they could already be primed to infect us.
Bat viruses are no joke. Since our immune systems aren't familiar with novel viruses, and the viruses aren't adapted to not kill their human hosts at first, novel bat viruses can do a lot of harm.
Not necessarily a new path, but a previously unknown path. Any place that bats directly interact with ‘land mammals’ leads to a mess of viral
recombination and reassortment… hence why the agriculture/wild interface in China is the site of so many spillovers. Rats especially carry similar viruses with many features that increase tropism, so the fact that rats are feeding on bats means we’re going to get a ton of crossover viruses especially well suited for transmission in mammals.
One such study’s key paragraph…
> While uncommon for coronaviruses of bats, furin cleavage sites are commonly found in coronaviruses of rodents and it is perhaps fitting to note that proteolytic processing of the coronavirus spike protein was first recognized in the model rodent coronavirus, murine hepatitis virus, MHV-A59 [53], with later analyses demonstrating the importance of furin for the proteolytic cleavage and function of its spike protein [54].
Last week I saw a couple of small hawks attacking a bat swarm as they came out of their cave at sunset. Less of a transmission vector probably, but there seems to be a lot more interaction between bats and other animals than I thought. I wonder if domestic cats attack bats.
> - and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission.
on the bright side and if history is of any help, as long as future-to-be-debarred "experts" aren't doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses while lying about it, we don't have much to fear.
Official US Congress report, mandated under Biden and whose results came under Biden, says the virus has "characteristic not found in nature" and that a lab-leak is the most likely source:
And Peter Daszak has been debarred, defunded and prevented from ever receiving funding from the US again.
I'm more worried about humans lying and humans siding with lying humans to then lie some more, worldwide, to the public --for years before the truth finally came up to light-- much more than I'm about rats attacking bats.
> mandated under Biden and whose results came under Biden
You missed the part where the original mandate was along party lines with Democrats supporting it and Republicans not, to investigate how the Trump administration handled the pandemic response. Republicans took control of the House and then redefined the agenda to be their own partisan viewpoint, to confirm what they already believed about gain-of-function and lab leak theories. They produced a nice Big Beautiful Report with a debatable connection to facts, which is not surprising in the least.
> before the truth finally came up to light
If you are looking to politicians for the truth...
> The behavior is all the more impressive given that the rodents hunt at night, when they are effectively blind; the rats may rely on their whiskers to detect changes in air currents caused by the bats’ flapping wings.
I was trying to remember if it was "do cats eat bats" or "do rats eat bats." Turns out it was cats, and once again reality is stranger than fiction. :D
“And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.”
― Lewis Carroll Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
Rats are extremely predatory, I once as a kid worked at a Reptile importer and a handful of rats escaped, they destroyed the mice from under their screen/grated cages. Almost as traumatic as when I learned how to dispatch an adult rat on the side of the table before feeding it off to the reptiles at 15 years old.
Rats are not predatory, they’re resourceful. You didn’t witness what rats do in the wild, you witnessed abused rats doing whatever they could to survive. Rats will eat mice if they need to but they will not seek them out when other food sources are available. You can’t judge the behavior of rodents when they are feeders. Mice would do the same thing. As would you and I.
Get yourself a nice black rat snake.
(Unironically, it drives me up a wall when I hear about people trying to exterminate snakes and spiders; the only reason those are around is because their food is.)
Rats are brilliant animals, they’re just tiny dogs. If you treat your rats well, they would have no reason to attack mice and would co-exist (although your rats would probably get sick because of disease. Pet rats (fancy rats) are illness prone.)
> The behavior is all the more impressive given that the rodents hunt at night, when they are effectively blind
I can't access the paper to check if they verified it, but given there is a strong IR light, and even humans can see IR light if strong enough (and close enough in frequency, which is typically true for IR illumination for cameras), I wonder if that is true.
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Deleted Comment
- the rats are effectively as blind as the bat in the dark, are they relying purely on sound and air currents to gauge their attack?
- and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission.
Are they? Aren't rats nocturnal in the first place, meaning evolution should have given them some benefit in that environment? AFAIK, rats have pretty OK contrast/motion detection even in low light situations.
I guess if "in the dark" means "low light" or "total darkness". You're probably right for "total darkness" but if it's "low light", I think the rats would "see" better than the bats.
Presumably it's been there for a long time and we just noticed.
As a previous commenter noted, rats are an invasive species in the expanding human/wildland interface. So they will be encountering novel bat viruses.
There may be other existing bat to human transmission paths, but maybe not....
We just noticed bat snatching. I doubt it's new discovery that rats also eat bats whenever the opportunity comes knocking.
Also: Bats -> rats -> (house) cats -> humans.
Bats have crazy immune systems that let them harbor all kinds of nasty stuff without it killing them on account of their unclean communal living habitat. Bats are in close contact where waste and bodily fluids are constantly coming into contact with other members, and these all carry pathogens.
Bat immune systems evolved as a defense mechanism. Bat viral loads are high, and the viruses get to evolve rapidly, come into contact with other virus genomes, and essentially explore the state space of potential virus genomes quickly. Constantly evolving novel glycoproteins, etc. Bats are essentially a virus optimization battleground.
These rats are an invasive species (to the cave) that also live in close proximity to humans. They've just been discovered hunting bats, meaning they're coming into close contact with bat viruses and potentially serving to introduce these into rat and, possibly subsequently, human populations.
Additionally, if the viruses can jump to rats, they're in a state where they could already be primed to infect us.
Bat viruses are no joke. Since our immune systems aren't familiar with novel viruses, and the viruses aren't adapted to not kill their human hosts at first, novel bat viruses can do a lot of harm.
One such study’s key paragraph…
> While uncommon for coronaviruses of bats, furin cleavage sites are commonly found in coronaviruses of rodents and it is perhaps fitting to note that proteolytic processing of the coronavirus spike protein was first recognized in the model rodent coronavirus, murine hepatitis virus, MHV-A59 [53], with later analyses demonstrating the importance of furin for the proteolytic cleavage and function of its spike protein [54].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235277142...
on the bright side and if history is of any help, as long as future-to-be-debarred "experts" aren't doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses while lying about it, we don't have much to fear.
Official US Congress report, mandated under Biden and whose results came under Biden, says the virus has "characteristic not found in nature" and that a lab-leak is the most likely source:
https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...
And Peter Daszak has been debarred, defunded and prevented from ever receiving funding from the US again.
I'm more worried about humans lying and humans siding with lying humans to then lie some more, worldwide, to the public --for years before the truth finally came up to light-- much more than I'm about rats attacking bats.
I wouldn't be so confident. HIV and Ebola came from the wild. Bird Flu also has the potential to be really bad.
You missed the part where the original mandate was along party lines with Democrats supporting it and Republicans not, to investigate how the Trump administration handled the pandemic response. Republicans took control of the House and then redefined the agenda to be their own partisan viewpoint, to confirm what they already believed about gain-of-function and lab leak theories. They produced a nice Big Beautiful Report with a debatable connection to facts, which is not surprising in the least.
> before the truth finally came up to light
If you are looking to politicians for the truth...
Textbook example of the blind eating the blind.
“And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.”
― Lewis Carroll Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
Dead Comment
I can't access the paper to check if they verified it, but given there is a strong IR light, and even humans can see IR light if strong enough (and close enough in frequency, which is typically true for IR illumination for cameras), I wonder if that is true.