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- Hacker News
- I played bass for Snatching Batsby tomcam
- The food chain myth destroyed so many people's minds. Wait until you hear that deer eat mice.by phendrenad2
- Or that chicken eat chicken.by chrisco255
- Horses eat chicks.by Traubenfuchs
- If you like the idea of vicious rats, read British horror writer James Herbert’s The Rats.by riazrizvi
- Snakes do it too. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/kantemo-b...by notherhack
- > 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.
by pflanze - Rats 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.
- Hm, maybe I should get some rats to keep the mice out of my house. Of course then I'd have rats.by SoftTalker
- Rats 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.by 3rodents
- The question "do rats eat bats?" sounds like taken straight from Alice In Wonderland, and now, disturbingly, we know that the answer is positive.by nine_k
- I 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
by taneq - > 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.
by pcthrowaway - Two 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.
by nortlov - > - and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission.
on the bright side and if history is of any help, as long as future-to-be-debarred "experts" aren't doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses while lying about it, we don't have much to fear.
Official US Congress report, mandated under Biden and whose results came under Biden, says the virus has "characteristic not found in nature" and that a lab-leak is the most likely source:
https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...
And Peter Daszak has been debarred, defunded and prevented from ever receiving funding from the US again.
I'm more worried about humans lying and humans siding with lying humans to then lie some more, worldwide, to the public --for years before the truth finally came up to light-- much more than I'm about rats attacking bats.
- What’s so ‘new’ about it?by lurquer
- I don't see how a new path for pathogen transmission is available?by neom
- > 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.by dgroshev
- > and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission
Presumably it's been there for a long time and we just noticed.
by vasco - This is the funny thing about echolocation in the dark-- it gives the bat's position away to the rat as well.by aqme28
- > 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.
- The 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.by jakewins
- Would you like to share the video?by cambaceres
- I'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.by neom
- My rats were very picky eaters. The inside of a cucumber slice would be eaten leaving the skin behind for example.by shawn_w
- How do you think he got so chonky?