What's the matter, bat got your tongue?
A park ranger in northwest Peru got a surprise when he encountered a toad with something in its mouth. This something happened to be a bat.
Ranger Yufani Olaya snapped a photograph of the bat-chomping toad in the Cerros de Amotape National Park, where he works. Olaya shared the photograph with biologist Phil Torres, who works at the Tambopata Research Center, a scientific outpost in the Peruvian Amazon. This is probably the first photographed record of a cane toad eating a bat, Torres said.
The bat in the photograph is likely a type of free-tailed bat, perhaps a velvety free-tailed bat (Molossus molossus), which is common throughout northern South America. In another instance, a different type of toad was observed eating a free-tailed bat in Brazil, Torres told LiveScience.
Cane toads are opportunistic feeders and well known for being voracious eaters — that trait has allowed them to be successful as an invasive species in places like Australia, Torres said. But it's a rare occurrence to find one eating a bat, which usually flies far from the ground where the amphibians hop.
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