Getting to Know Nature’s Toughest Bat
Getting to Know Nature’s Toughest Bat
January 7, 2015
Desert & Water Research, Natural Sciences
The Daily Mail — Lurking in isolated patches of desert across Morocco and the Middle East, desert long-eared bats seem to be fearless.
The long-eared desert bat
This long-eared bat has a taste for scorpions.
After killing the scorpion, the bat carries it back to a roost and eats it head-first. Usually it eats the whole thing, including the stinger and poison gland.
Ben-Gurion University’s Dr. Carmi Korine of the Marco and Louise Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, recently caught eight of these bats and watched them hunt scorpions in their lab.
The bats ignored dead prey, only attacking live ones that moved.
They also showed an interest in boxes containing live scorpions, suggesting they were homing in on sound.
Read about other “misfits” of the animal kingdom on the Daily Mail website >>
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