Free Dark Banquet by Bill Schutt Page A

the new researcher had not only relieved my friend of her bat-keeping duties but had decided to suspend the colony’s live chicken supplement (basically to save a few bucks each week while eliminating the far from insubstantial hassle of dealing with live chickens). Within ten days, vampire bats began dying at an alarming rate—a trend that stopped immediately after a “talk” with the grad student led to a resumption of weekly chicken dinners for the colony.
    During the three years that we maintained our colonies of common and white-winged vampire bats, it’s safe to say that we saw some strange stuff, much of it relating to feeding behavior or social interactions between roost-mates. We found out later that Farouk and his Trinidadian bat crew had already noted much of what we were observing at Cornell. Their reluctance to publish, however, made it news to us, and we were grateful that these bat experts had (for some reason) decided to take us on as collaborators and coauthors. There were numerous occasions when something very much like the following exchange took place over a crackling long-distance phone line.
    â€œYes?” Farouk’s Trinidadian accent made it sound more like
yes-ah.
    â€œFarouk?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou’re not going to believe what we just saw.”
    Silence.
    â€œI think
Diaemus
is mimicking chicks. They’re snuggling right up to these hens—then biting them on the chest. It’s unfriggin-believable!”
    Silence.
    â€œFarouk?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHave you ever seen that before?”
    â€œYes. The bites are on the brood patch.”
    â€œOh…Cool. Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.”
    â€œYes.” Click.
    I’ve always considered my friend Farouk Muradali to be one of the most generous and nurturing people I’ve ever met. But to say that he is a man of few words…well, you get the picture.
    My collaborators and I also learned from the start that Arthur Greenhall had been right about the significant differences that existed between vampire bat species (in our case, between
Desmodus rotundus
and
Diaemus youngi
)—and we would discover that most of this variation was related to the bat’s preference for either mammalian or avian blood, respectively.
    â€œDiaemus
doesn’t jump,” Farouk had said (in what would become his equivalent of the Gettysburg Address). And after a hundred-plus trials on our miniature force platform, we had to agree. But why was this so?
    Initially, we tested our system out with the common vampire bat,
Desmodus,
and as in previous studies, we confirmed that these bats could make spectacular, acrobatic jumps, in any direction. Pushing off the ground with their powerful pectoral muscles,
Desmodus
used its elongated thumbs (the last things to leave the ground) to impart precise direction to jumps that could reach three feet in height.

    These amazing jumps, along with their ability to run at speeds of up to two meters per second, were adaptations for terrestrial blood feeding. They enabled the common vampire bat to escape predators, avoid being crushed by their relatively enormous prey, and initiate flight after a blood meal. The ability to feed efficiently on large quadrupeds is the primary reason why
Desmodus rotundus
has been so successful in terms of numbers and range, but in all likelihood this success was a rather recent development.
    Until about five hundred years ago,
Desmodus rotundus
may have been anything but “common.” In fact, populations would have been severely restricted not only by climate but by the finite number of large mammals that were present in any given area. Quite possibly the vampires would have been compelled (as they sometimes are today) to feed on smaller mammals as well as birds and other vertebrates like snakes and lizards.
    Starting in the early 1500s, however, the influx of Europeans and their domestic animals into the Neotropics