It’s been a wild week for bat news. First, we learned that some European giant bats eat birds in mid-air, but not before brutally tearing their wings off. Then, we learned that several North American bat species can glow in the dark, a feature that is almost entirely useless to bats, who, you might recall, are famously as blind as themselves.
Today, I bring you the horror of Germany’s brown rats, who, just in time for Halloween, have decided to flip the script on bats. Where European bats were the predators, tearing the wings off of birds before chowing down on them, German bats are being snatched out of the air by rats.
According to research published in Global Ecology and Conservation, back in 2020, scientists set up infrared cameras inside the Segeberger Kalkberg caves. Over five weeks, the cameras recorded 30 predation attempts and 13 confirmed kills. The rats were eating the bats, but also hoarding them for later.
The researchers found a stash of 52 bat corpses tucked neatly into a cave crevice; some were half-eaten, while others were untouched, as if they were being kept in the freezer for later.
The footage revealed two distinct hunting styles. Some rats were aerial interceptors, leaping as high as their little rat legs could take them and snatching swooping bats out of the air. Others were sneakier, creepier, as they lurk in the shadows, ambushing grounded rats before ironically delivering a precise killing bite as if they were doing their own impression of a vampire.
That wasn’t gross enough for you? If the bat was still twitching, the rat held it down with its tiny forelegs and kept gnawing until the job was done.
By 2024, investigators found another cache of bat corpses near Lüneburger Kalkberg, a site that mirrored the earlier massacre. The matching methods left little doubt that this wasn’t an isolated incident. The rats had developed a taste for bats and seemed to have quickly established a whole culture around hunting and eating them.
The researchers say that this all goes to show that rats are really just opportunists. Whether it’s German bats or the York Street pizza, they will eat whatever is around, even if it happens to be an endangered species vital for pollination and pest control.
It’s also mildly terrifying to see bats and rats closely mingling, since both species are known to carry pathogens with a history of causing pandemics that kill millions. A frightening thought, but until one species transfers a horrible disease to the other, which then transfers it to us, we can be entertained by the gruesome rat bat killing spree.
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