Bats beware. The ability to fly won’t save you from hungry, determined rats.
In a first, brown rats were filmed hunting bats by catching them midair. The finding, published in the November Global Ecology and Conservation, puts a spotlight on bat conservation in urban areas.
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. At the cave’s entrance — a hole in the ground — a small kiosk protects bats passing through from local cats that hunt them. The researchers