Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Today’s interesting fact has to do with vampire bats and how they find their prey.

Vampire bats do not swoop down on their prey.

Instead they land, shuffle along the ground to the animals they will feed on, then they carefully slice through an artery or vein, and carefully lap up a few teaspoons of blood, before shuffling off to where they take off and go back to their roost.

Vampire bats are very proficient in finding the parts of the body where the blood vessels are close to the skin.

Scientists have recently discovered they use the same heat identifying nerve cells we have in our lips and tongues to find these spots.

But where our nerve cells are set to identify heat that would burn us, the vampire bats heat nerve cells in their lips are have been set the temperature of the blood.

So the vampire bat's lips are heat seekers.

No comments: