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Rats filmed snatching bats from air
- zeristor 1y ago“Rat Eat Bat” is a more succinct title.
- shaneofalltrad 1y agoRats 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.
- SoftTalker 1y agoHm, maybe I should get some rats to keep the mice out of my house. Of course then I'd have rats.
- ipaddr 1y agoIf you have mice you won't have rats. Mice can be a positive sign.
- delichon 1y agoI have both. I've trapped both in the same trap on the same night.
- mikkupikku 1y agoGet 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.)
- chairmansteve 1y agoI have a black widow problem. Their food is flying insects.... Any tips?
- mikkupikku 1y agoI wouldn't worry about them. A few thousand people get bit by them every year but there hasn't been a fatality in decades. They're very unlikely to bite and very unlikely to cause any harm at all even if they do bite. Maybe get some sticky fly paper though.
- marcosdumay 1y agoWhat eats them? (Really, from a distance they seem unbeatable.)
- SoftTalker 1y agoWasps
- dwd 1y agoDaddy long-legs are known predators of Australian red-backs, while the American cellar spider supposedly hunts black widows.
- marcosdumay 1y ago> the only reason those are around is because their food is For some reason everybody in my city is proudly boasting bout the recent large capybara population... And again, for some reason those same people didn't react well when jaguars decided to show up in the urban area. People are stupid.
- zdragnar 1y agoWe have all of the above and more. Alas, my wife is more afraid of our rat and pine snakes than she is of mice and rats. Fortunately, the pine snakes only try to move into our house and sheds once or twice a year or so.
- 3rodents 1y agoRats 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.)
- wiether 1y agoNext step: get some turtles!
- shadyKeystrokes 1y ago[dead]
- 3rodents 1y agoRats 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.
- threatofrain 1y agoBut then we see the rats hunting bats...
- whatever1 1y agoHow do I know this is not Sora?
- tomrod 1y agoSora is too smooth
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- skylurk 1y agoOne angle could be to consider it from a game theory perspective. Is this the sort of organisation that would be negatively impacted by publishing unverified stories? If so, what is the likelihood that the content is just Sora?
- puttycat 1y agoGame theory or Bayesian inference?
- skylurk 1y agoI'm an expert in neither, but I would say both? I thought of game theory initially because I framed the situation as a repeated game, where every article published is a new round. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeated_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeated_game But then I went and muddied it with the word "likelihood" :)
- hyghjiyhu 1y agoThis is an important analysis to perform but it's far from a sure thing. Motives can be murky and hard to assess. Maybe there is one particular scientist that has a baby on the way and fears he is about to be laid off unless he can get a sensational article published asap. A little helping hand from ai could be just the thing, and it's based on a true story just touched up a little bit and besides it's not like the readers will suffer any real harm from this tiny little transgression. Just one little shortcut one little time off course after that it's right back to honest science.
- riazrizvi 1y agoIf you like the idea of vicious rats, read British horror writer James Herbert’s The Rats.
- nortlov 1y agoTwo 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.
- embedding-shape 1y ago> 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.
- nortlov 1y agoYou 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).
- neom 1y agoThat's right, rats eyes are mostly rod based, they are very optimized for contrast shifts in extremely low light. They're also mostly colour blind.
- vasco 1y ago> and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission Presumably it's been there for a long time and we just noticed.
- chairmansteve 1y ago>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....
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- neom 1y agoI'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.
- terminalshort 1y agoHow do you think he got so chonky?
- shawn_w 1y agoMy rats were very picky eaters. The inside of a cucumber slice would be eaten leaving the skin behind for example.
- neom 1y agotrue! But that's also because cucurbitacins, given the size of a rat I'd imagine it wouldn't have to eat much cucumber skin to get pretty sick.
- DroneBetter 1y agothat'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)
- mjh2539 1y agoThe skin of cucurbits is usually fairly high in cucurbitacins (usually much higher than the flesh).
- HelloNurse 1y agoUnlike bats, cucumber slices can be easily transported to a safe eating place, rarely fight back, and are ideally suitable for precision nibbling.
- brcmthrowaway 1y agoWhy is this surprising, aren't rats used to torture?
- verisimi 1y agorats !heart bats
- jakewins 1y agoThe 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cambaceres 1y agoWould you like to share the video?
- wiseowise 1y agoFucker, another reason to eradicate the pest.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- SubiculumCode 1y agogreat another disease vector from bats.
- phendrenad2 1y agoThe food chain myth destroyed so many people's minds. Wait until you hear that deer eat mice.
- Traubenfuchs 1y agoHorses eat chicks. https://youtu.be/ZnYNmGMsU18 https://youtu.be/ZnYNmGMsU18
- chrisco255 1y agoOr that chicken eat chicken.
- nine_k 1y agoThe question "do rats eat bats?" sounds like taken straight from Alice In Wonderland, and now, disturbingly, we know that the answer is positive.
- taneq 1y agoI 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
- tomcam 1y agoI played bass for Snatching Bats
- codelion 1y agoWhen mammals hunt other mammals strange things can happen.
- grg0 1y agoRough life inside a cave.
- gooseyman 1y agoCovid-200
- luxuryballs 1y agoweird my IP is blocked according to science.org website
- pcthrowaway 1y ago> 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.
- rukuu001 1y agoNever underestimate a rat
- deafpolygon 1y agowhat about bats make them good carriers for disease?
- notherhack 1y agoSnakes do it too. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/kantemo-bat-cave-hanging-serpents-snakes-yucatan-mexico-video https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/kantemo-b...
- pflanze 1y ago> 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.