Experts Love Them : Bats’ Scary Image Called Merely a Flight of Fancy

Bats may make scary decorations for Halloween, but scientists say the furry creatures of the night have gotten a bad name unfairly.

“They really are the least dangerous animals around,” said Gary McCracken, an associate professor of zoology at the University of Tennessee who has studied literally millions of bats. The only time bats ever try to hurt McCracken is when he takes samples of their blood with a hypodermic needle.

He takes blood from bats?

“Yeah, I call it a variation on an old theme,” he says.

Of the 800 species of bats, only three are vampires that feed by drawing blood from animals. All three species are located in the tropical regions of Central America and they were discovered long after the legend of Dracula, who turned into a vampire bat to steal the blood of humans, was entrenched in the lore of Eastern Europe.

Whence Dracula Legend?

Which means the Europeans had fathomed an animal they could never have known existed in the real world.

“It’s a real mystery how it happened,” says Merlin P. Tuttle, president of Bat Conservation International, a group that promotes the welfare of bats. “Drinking of blood is part of ancient beliefs that go back to the Greeks. Dracula was a real (15th-Century) Romanian prince who was known as ‘The Impaler.’ How bats got involved in all this is the real mystery.”

But since those times, bats have been associated with all that is scary and evil. Paper bats are strung from ‘haunted’ houses on Halloween and Dracula capes and fangs are a favorite trick-or-treat costume.

“We’re frightened by bats because we don’t understand them,” Tuttle says. “They’re shy and active at night, so we see them only in glimpses. It’s truly unfair because they are portrayed to the public in the most unflattering light.”

Almost all bats feed on insects, which ought to make them more popular.

“I’m surprised there are any insects left in the state of Texas,” says McCracken, who has studied Texas caves housing 2 million bats capable of together eating a quarter-million pounds of insects in one night.

Vampire bats are the exception, he says. The three Central American species feed on deer and other wild mammals at night, although the introduction of dogs, cattle and horses to their native habitat has added a new source of food.

Vampire Bats’ Methods

The bats slit the haunch or neck of a sleeping animal with their sharp teeth, then lap up the blood with lightning-quick tongues, secreting an anti-coagulant agent in their saliva that prevents blood from clotting.

A single bat will consume only ounces of blood--not enough to harm the sleeping animal. However, since vampires are sociable creatures, they often feed in groups, letting enough blood from a single animal to kill it in some instances.

And, yes, they have been known to feed on sleeping humans.

“They go for an exposed area of a sleeping person,” said McCracken. “The big toe seems to be a favored spot.”

The vampires do not harm the human victim, who often sleeps through the attack, except in the rare cases when the animal is rabid.