Spectral bats, also known as great false vampire bats, live up to their spooky monikers. They’re the biggest bats in the Western Hemisphere, but despite their three-foot wingspans, they’re rarely seen by scientists. And unlike a majority of their cousins, which feed primarily on insects or fruit, spectral bats are carnivores that use their outsize teeth to eat birds, rodents and even their fellow bats.
But after staking out a tree in a Costa Rican forest inhabited by a family of spectral bats, scientists have discovered that these creatures of the night have a cuddly side: They bring each other food, play with bugs and greet their roost-mates with batwing “hugs.”
Marisa Tietge, a research associate at the Natural History Museum in Berlin and a Ph.D. student at Humboldt University, first spotted the spectral bats’ home in December 2022. She was walking through the forest in the Guanacaste province in Costa Rica in search of large, old trees in which bats might roost.
“There are only a few known roosts in the whole of Latin America, and then there’s nothing really known about the species,” said Ms. Tietge, the lead author of a paper in the journal PLOS One about the project that was published on Wednesday. “I knew instantly: This is kind of a big discovery, so I want to do something with this.”
She returned a year later with motion-activated camera equipment to capture candid moments from the bats’ home life. After an initial period of in-person observation, Ms. Tietge relied primarily upon video footage from cameras placed within the bats’ hollow tree. “I just came for checkups and cleanups, because there was a lot of defecation” that blocked the camera lenses, Ms. Tietge said.
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The post Forget Bear Hugs, These Bats Greet Each Other by Embracing appeared first on New York Times.
