Bizarre Sighting: Cane Toad Eating a Bat?

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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Georgia house infested with 20,000 bats

TIFTON, Ga. - An empty home in Georgia is infested with as many as 20,000 bats and officials say they've declared it unfit for human habitation until the bats are cleared. "The interior and exterior walls are just full of guano," Melissa Skidmore of Tru Tech, an animal removal service, said of the home in Tifton, Ga. "Some of it is old and has turned to dust and it is just a cocktail of pathogens. People going in will need proper equipment to cover their skin, clothes and noses. We are talking about between 10,000 and 20,000 bats," Skidmore told The Tifton Gazette Monday. The infestation of Mexican free-tailed bats was one of the worse she had ever seen, she said. A local code enforcement officer said he had no choice but to post the declaration when he saw several live bats upstairs and spotted several dead bats on the bottom floor of the house. Local real estate agent Julie Smith said the house is in foreclosure with an agency that has a buyer interested in purchasing the house. "The goal is for everyone to work together so that a family can live here safely," Smith said.