Rats filmed snatching bats from air
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.
Two thoughts come to mind:
- 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.
> 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.
Textbook example of the blind eating the blind.
The question "do rats eat bats?" sounds like taken straight from Alice In Wonderland, and now, disturbingly, we know that the answer is positive.
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.
Snakes do it too. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/kantemo-b...
If you like the idea of vicious rats, read British horror writer James Herbert’s The Rats.
The food chain myth destroyed so many people's minds. Wait until you hear that deer eat mice.
I played bass for Snatching Bats
Never underestimate a rat
Rough life inside a cave.
weird my IP is blocked according to science.org website
When mammals hunt other mammals strange things can happen.
Covid-200
How do I know this is not Sora?
what about bats make them good carriers for disease?
great another disease vector from bats.
“Rat Eat Bat” is a more succinct title.
Why is this surprising, aren't rats used to torture?
rats !heart bats
Fucker, another reason to eradicate the pest.
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.