science

Poised on a humanmade landing platform at the entrance of a cave in northern Germany, an invasive brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) lunges at a bat and yanks it out of the air, after which it quickly becomes dinner. The discovery—documented in infrared above and reported this month in Global Ecology and Conservation—marks the first time researchers have captured rats hunting bats by grabbing them from the sky.

Scientists staked out Segeberger Kalkberg cave—about 50 kilometers north of Hamburg—between 2021 and 2024. The site is home to thousands of bats, including Natterer’s bats (Myotis nattereri) and Daubenton’s bats (M. daubentonii). The team documented 30 predation attempts and 13 kills over this period—with rats at the platform (part of a bat-counting device) either grabbing bats midflight or shortly after they landed. The behavior is all the more impressive given that the rodents hunt at night, when they are effectively blind; the rats may rely on their whiskers to detect changes in air currents caused by the bats’ flapping wings.

Given the rodents’ hunting prowess, the scientists estimate that even a small number of rats could remove thousands of bats from the cave. That makes rats a previously underappreciated decimator of these ecologically important species and a possible transmitter of bat-borne pathogens such as coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses. Scientists have previously captured video of animals eating bats in other caves—a potential route for virus transmission.

The news article is paywalled but the scientific paper is not. Link is below: the paper contains quite a few really cool videos of the rat catching a bat in mid-air, as well as discussions on conservation/biodiversity (as the rats in question are an invasive species)

Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989425004950