Zoology Notes 001: vampire bats can run

This is the first of what I hope will become a regular feature on Animal Magic, interesting zoological nuggets that are begging to be known more widely. I am calling these Zoological Notes, a nod to Charles Darwin’s eponymous zoological miscellany from the voyage of HMS Beagle.

In the course of researching a feature for BBC Earth on vampire bats (published here), I came across this amazing video of a common vampire bat on a treadmill. Vampire bats can run.

In a 2005, researchers described the common vampire bat’s remarkable gait in detail. At low speeds (up to 0.56 ms-1), the bats walked just like other four-legged mammals. But when the treadmill got faster, the vampires broke into “a unique bounding gait, in which the forelimbs instead of the hindlimbs are recruited for force production as the wings are much more powerful than the legs.” In the study, published in Nature, the fastest bat reached a speed of 1.4 ms^-1, though earlier research suggests that when really pushed they can to zip along at more than 2 ms^-1.

“The walking and hopping makes sense if they are to pursue ground-dwelling mammals for the blood meal,” says John Hermanson of Cornell University, the senior author of the study. Indeed, this is how the common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) typically sneaks up on the cattle and horses on which it commonly dines. The other two vampires (the white-winged vampire bat and the hairy-legged vampire bat) feed mainly off birds and are not such capable runners, he says. “We keep studying them!”