What's creepier than running into a rat in the dark? Running into a bat in the dark.
But what happens when a bat runs into a rat?
Now, thanks to a bunch of German scientists, we know. According to NPR, they were conducting research studying how bats communicate when they swarm, and this happened:
A rat caught a bat right out of the air and ate it.
‘We thought, oh well, that's an unlucky coincidence,' says Mirjam Knörnschild, co-author of the paper and head of evolutionary diversity dynamics at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. But then it happened again. And again.
The researchers wondered if this was unique due to the location of a large city where there are lots of rats, so they set up in a cave outside the town of Lüneburg.
And saw the same scenario go down. Rats showed up in the cave and snatched bats out of the air in pure darkness.
‘Bats can echolocate, so they should have been able to see the rat, but how was the rat able to see the bats? That's still a mystery, actually,' says Knörnschild.
There's some speculation that the rats used their whiskers to sense the movement of the air from the bats' wings, but it's hard to know that for sure.
What the researchers were most worried about is the viruses the bats carry transmitting to the rats, which is a step closer to human transmission.
The bats in the area are also a protected species that helps control insect populations, and the rats hunting them aren't doing much to keep the bats' numbers up.
So, Knörnschild is working with Umweltbundesamt, a German conservation agency, to humanely reduce the rat population around the bats.
‘We don't want to just report curiosity,' she says. ‘We want this to ideally be translated into conservation action.'
The one theory I haven't seen discussed is that rats have always eaten bats, and they are the only thing holding Batpocalypse at bay.
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