Date: October 4, 2016
Source: Pensoft Publishers
While snakes
are well-known enemies to bats, their preying on the winged mammals has hardly
been recorded. Furthermore, no bat as big and heavy as the common vampire, has
been described being killed and eaten prior to the present study, published in
the open access journal Subterranean Biology.
The study,
where scientists, led by Sarah Martin-Solano, Universidad de las Fuerzas
Armadas, ESPE, Ecuador, record a rainbow boa catching the bat, is the first
known such case to have taken place on a cave's floor. The documented
observation serves to confirm that snakes do predate on bats in caves, and is
also the first such case known from Ecuador.
Apart from
the detailed description, the scientists also provide a film, showing almost in
full the event of a rainbow boa catching, killing and swallowing an adult
female common vampire bat.
The
predation has been observed in a 450-metre-long cave in Tena, Ecuador. There,
an adult female common vampire bat, one of the three bat species to feed
exclusively on blood, was seen to fly into the cave right over the boa's head
and its waiting open jaws, raised some 30-35 centimetres above the ground.
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