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Bats can eat thousands on insects in one night.

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Bats can eat thousands on insects in one night.

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What Do Bats Eat?

With close to 1000 different types of bats, it shouldn't be surprising that bats eat a lot of different types of food. They are also great hunters able to locate the faintest sounds and smallest movement. So what do bats eat?

Most bats eat insects and are called insectivores. These bats like to eat beetles, moths, mosquitoes, and more. And they sure do eat a lot of insects. Did you know that one little brown bat can eat up to 500 mosquito-sized insects in an hour? Now that's a lot of insects. And some bat colonies have millions of bats! Just imagine how many more insects there might be without these insectivorous bats.

There are some bats that like to eat fruit, seeds, and pollen from flowers. These bats are called frugivores. Their favorite foods are figs, mangoes, dates, and bananas. Some frugivores have been known to drink sugar water from humming bird feeders.

So what other types of food do bats eat? There are bats that eat birds, fish, frogs, lizards, even other bats. There are even bats that drink blood. These are called vampire bats. There are only 3 types of vampire bats and they all live in Central and South America. And don't worry - vampire bats do not like to drink human blood. They mainly get blood from cows, sheep, and horses. To get blood, vampire bats make a small cut in a sleeping animals skin and lap up a little bit of blood. Vampire bats only need about 2 teaspoons of blood a day - that's such a small amount that often times the cow or sheep doesn't even wake up while the bat is feeding.
References:
Wilson, Don. 1997. Bats in Question. The Smithsonian Answer Book. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington. 168p.

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What Do Bats Eat?With close to 1000 different types of bats, it shouldn't be surprising that bats eat a lot of different types of food. They are also great hunters able to locate the faintest sounds and smallest movement.

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Tish the goldfish achieved fame late in life after being recognised by the Guinness Book of Records only last year.

He was found dead at the bottom of his bowl earlier this week after a short illness.

Tish was buried in a yoghurt carton at the bottom of his owner Hilda Hand's garden.
Golden oldie
Mrs Hand, 72, of Thirsk, North Yorkshire, said she had become close to Tish over the years.

"Goldfish are supposed to have a four-second memory, but I'm sure Tish recognised me," she said.

"He always knew when it was feeding time and I used to talk to him."

As word of Tish's longevity spread, he "became something of a celebrity", she said.

"People always used to ask how Tish was doing. I don't think we will be getting another one.

"We couldn't replace Tish, he was part of the family."

Mrs Hand's son, Peter, won Tish, along with another goldfish, Tosh, playing roll-a-penny at a funfair in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, in 1956.

His parents took on the fish after Peter married and left home. Tosh died in 1975.
Piscean pensioner
In 1998 the fish took the longevity title from Fred, a Worthing goldfish who died in 1980 aged 41.

Although his age could not be verified by biological tests, the Guinness Book of Records investigators were persuaded there was nothing fishy about the claims and recognised his status.

In later life, Tish faded from bright orange to a distinguished silver, but remained healthy until shortly before his death.

Mr Hand said the secret of his long life was not being overfed, and being put in the sun occasionally.

The 11.5cm fish had a habit in his earlier days of trying to jump out of his bowl, and was kept safe by a net placed over the top.

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bbc news world uk international foreign british online service

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BBC News | UK | Oldest goldfish has his chips

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Tish the goldfish achieved fame late in life after being recognised by the Guinness Book of Records only last year. He was found dead at the bottom of his bowl earlier this week after a short illness. Tish was buried in a yoghurt carton at the bottom of his owner Hilda Hand's garden.

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Bullfighting conjures a common image: An angry bull charging at a matador's small red cape, the muleta. But, why does the beast charge at the sight of red?

Actually, it doesn't. Bulls, along with all other cattle, are color-blind to red. Thus, the bull is likely irritated not by the muleta's color, but by the cape's movement as the matador whips it around. In support of this is the fact that a bull charges the matador's other cape - the larger capote - with equal fury. Yet this cape is magenta on one side and gold or blue on the other.
Related: What Really Happens to Fighting Bulls After the Fight?
Still don't believe it? In 2007, the Discovery Channel's MythBusters tested a live bull on color versus movement in three separate experiments. First, they put three stationary flags, which were red, blue and white, in the bull's enclosure. The bull charged all three flags regardless of color. Next, they put three dummies dressed in red, blue and white in the ring, and again the bull charged all three without discrimination (and actually charged the red dummy last).

Finally, they put a live person dressed in red in the ring with the bull. That person stood still while two cowboys - not in red - moved around the ring. The bull went after the moving cowboys and left the motionless red-clad person alone.

So, if a bull can't see red, why is the muleta red? The small cape comes out in the last stage of the bullfight, when the bull meets its end, and its color helps mask one of the more gruesome aspects of a bull fight: splatters of the animal's blood.

Just don't tell that to everyone's favorite pacifist cartoon bull, Ferdinand:

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Bullfighting conjures a common image: An angry bull charging at a matador's small red cape, the muleta. But, why does the beast charge at the sight of red? Actually, it doesn't. Bulls, along with all other cattle, are color-blind to red.

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(Image credit: Grace Pryor and David Hu, New York University)

Snakes can slither across flat surfaces without legs, but not entirely without help. That's because snake scales act as friction hooks which catch in rough points on surfaces, a new study shows.

Strangely, the finding could eventually lead to robotic snakes that move more naturally.

"When I first started studying snakes, we didn't have personal computers or robotics," said David Hu, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech, "but now we have the tools to emulate nature."

Hu has always found fascination in puzzling out the natural movements of creatures that have mystified scientists. As a younger researcher studying at MIT, he showed how mosquitoes can use their spindly legs to stand on surfaces ranging from walls to water.

The serpentine motion of snakes presents perhaps an irresistible challenge - decoding an ancient movement so unlike the flying, swimming, walking and running used by other animals.
Slither and slide
Biologists have previously observed the unusual properties of snake scales, but no one had tried to connect them with how snakes move until now. Some had speculated that snakes needed twigs or rocks to push against, but failed to explain how snakes navigated fairly featureless surfaces such as desert sands.

"We wanted to come up with the simplest possible explanation for how snakes move on flat ground," Hu told LiveScience.

The Georgia Tech researchers first tested the snake scale friction by sliding unconscious snakes across flat surfaces. Snakes slid easily in the forward direction, but their scale friction resisted sliding backwards or sideways.

That test provided a friction coefficient that they could plug into computer models, which they used to predict how well snakes might move on different surfaces.

Next, Hu and his colleagues recorded the movement of the awakened snakes on very smooth fiberboard, and on cloth that provides a relatively rougher surface. The snakes had trouble moving on the smooth fiberboard, but could move more easily on a cloth-covered plank.

However, the snakes ran into movement difficulties again when researchers fitted them with a cloth jacket, which basically eliminated the scale friction.
Great galloping snakes
Snakes don't just slither when caught on time-lapse camera. They can also move in the well-known sidewinding motion, or even scrunch themselves up like an accordion.

"Snakes have a lot of different ways of moving, sort of like a horse that can trot or gallop," Hu said.

The study's model had successfully used the scale friction to predict much of the snake movement, but only accounted for 65 percent of the speed. Something else was missing.

Then the researchers noticed that the snakes were lifting parts of their bodies as they slithered forward on the recorded videos. Hu described it as "dynamic weight distribution" that allowed snakes to concentrate their weight on a few points and move more quickly.

"That can lead to sidewinding, but they can also more subtly shift their weight," Hu noted. "It will change the speed of snake a great deal."

The study represents a first step in better understanding serpentine movement, as detailed in the June 8 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hu pointed out that some of the snake's highest speeds are still unexplained by the model, and may have to do with snakes having precise muscle control over each scale.

"As we were waking them, we could see them twitching individual scales," Hu explained, and compared the snake-scale connection to goose bumps on human flesh.

If that sounds a bit creepy, don't worry - plenty of people feel the same way.

Gallery: Snakes, Frogs and Lizards

How Snakes Swallow Larger Creatures

More Snake News, Images & Information

Jeremy has written for publications such as Popular Science, Scientific American Mind and Reader's Digest Asia. He obtained his masters degree in science journalism from New York University, and completed his undergraduate education in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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(Image credit: Grace Pryor and David Hu, New York University) Snakes can slither across flat surfaces without legs, but not entirely without help. That's because snake scales act as friction hooks which catch in rough points on surfaces, a new study shows. Strangely, the finding could eventually lead to robotic snakes that move more naturally.

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Honeybees can be trained to sniff out explosives.

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Honeybees can be trained to sniff out explosives.

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Police and military personnel have been using dogs to sniff out explosives for decades. According to scientists from the Defense Advanced Research Laboratory (DARPA), who have been working with honeybees since 1999, bees can actually challenge dogs when it comes to sense of smell. Those same, buzzing insects that seek out molecular hints of the pollen they use to make honey can just as easily detect other minute particles in the air, including traces of materials used to make bombs. So how do you train them to respond to TNT the way they respond to pollen?

The same way you train any animal to do almost anything: by associating a particular stimulus with a reward. With Pavlov's dog, associating the sound of a bell with the smell of food caused the dog to drool when the bell rang. With honeybees at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where researchers are conducting the most recent military studies with bees, associating the smell of bomb ingredients with sugar water causes the bees to extend their proboscis, as if they were about to extract sweet nectar from a flower, when they smell explosives. And it doesn't take very long. Bees who are going to get the association get it quickly, after only a few exposures to vaporized explosives ingredients followed by the sugar water.

With the bees strapped into small tubes, scientists involved in the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project release the smell of chemical components used to make explosives like dynamite, C-4 and liquid bombs. Expecting the sugar water to follow, each trained bee extends its proboscis, which starts waving in the air, searching for nectar. It's this obvious response that makes this particular training method so useful. By containing the bees in an enclosed structure, researchers can use monitoring equipment to alert to the waving of the proboscises. In this case, a digital camera combined with pattern-recognition software can pick up the waving and indicate the presence of explosives in the vicinity. The portable structure makes it ideal for testing in airports, subway stations and at roadside checkpoints in war zones like Iraq. The bees can detect the target chemicals in the air in concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion.

Years earlier, a DARPA-funded project trained honeybees to be attracted to explosives instead of pollen using the same sugar-water-reward process. This study trained them to swarm around the location of the scent of 2,4-dinitrotoluene, a chemical residue left by several different types of bombs. The uncontained bees worked very well in small, outdoor areas, where security guards could easily see where they were swarming, but were harder to track when they were used to detect explosives in large, uncontained spaces. So researchers fitted the bees with tiny radio transmitters to find them -- and the bomb -- when they swarmed. Uncontained, trained bees wouldn't be very welcome at airport security checkpoints, but they could potentially work wonders in a war zone.

Researchers at Los Alamos are also training bees to sniff out drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine.

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How can you train honeybees to sniff for bombs?

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Police and military personnel have been using dogs to sniff out explosives for decades. According to scientists from the Defense Advanced Research Laboratory (DARPA), who have been working with honeybees since 1999, bees can actually challenge dogs when it comes to sense of smell.