Though, apart from the whole "never-before-seen" thing, I'm not sure why a predator catching prey is such a big deal. Cats catch birds in flight. Frogs catch flies in flight. I guess there's some poetry because "rat" and "bat" rhyme in English.
The observation happened by chance, says Florian Gloza-Rausch, a biologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. He and colleagues had been studying a colony of 30,000 bats overwintering in a cave about 60 kilometers north of Hamburg.
I suppose if the bats in question were endangered, there'd be an issue, but that does not appear to be the case.
Brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) figured out how to get inside the kiosk and climb up to the bats’ landing platform at the entrance, using a curtain the researchers placed inside the kiosk for filming purposes.
Rats are scary smart. More importantly, they adapt to what we do.
Out of 30 filmed predation attempts, 13 were successful. The attacks happened in complete darkness, so the researchers suspect that the rats sensed the bats with their whiskers.
"Rat-sense. Tingling." Seriously, though, I'd love to see a follow-up study to determine if the rats get better at it over time. And also a follow-up to see if it is their whiskers, or if rats have a heretofore unknown echolocation sense like the bats have. Unlikely, as rats are probably the most-studied animals in the world. Still, nature surprises us all the time, as this article demonstrates.
Look, I have nothing against bats (or rats); predation is just part of nature. However, a lot of the rat population is the result of human activity, so maybe this happens because of us, collectively? I don't know. It's kind of like how some people insist cats should be kept indoors to protect birds. As if cats were the invasive species, and not us.
A colony of just 15 brown rats could reduce the cave’s population of 30,000 bats by 7 percent each winter, Gloza-Rausch and colleagues estimate.
I imagine you never have a colony of "just" 15 rats. At least not for very long. And, okay, the researchers would know better than I do what the conservation issues might be.
Bats are, of course, just as important to the ecosystem as rats, however maligned both critters may be. Perhaps not as majestic as the turkey vulture, but they are cuter.
