Pharyngula

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Thursday, March 24, 2005

Great galloping vampire bats!

Investigators have analyzed videos of vampire bats charging down plexiglas runways, and learned that they have evolved a novel running gait. Here are a few stills of the action:

vampire bat running
Desmodus rotundus, using a running gait at 0.61 m s-1 with a stride frequency of 4.71 Hz. Images are shown at 24-ms intervals; the background is a 1.0-cm2 grid.

You can also watch the movie.

And here's the abstract from the paper:

Most tetrapods have retained terrestrial locomotion since it evolved in the Palaeozoic era1, but bats have become so specialized for flight that they have almost lost the ability to manoeuvre on land at all. Vampire bats, which sneak up on their prey along the ground, are an important exception. Here we show that common vampire bats can also run by using a unique bounding gait, in which the forelimbs instead of the hindlimbs are recruited for force production as the wings are much more powerful than the legs. This ability to run seems to have evolved independently within the bat lineage.

And then, of course, they are also capable of popping themselves up into the air with a single push of their forelimbs, unfolding their wings, and taking off into flight. What magnificent alien beasties!


Riskin DK, Hermanson JW (2005) Independent evolution of running in vampire bats. Nature 434:292.


Trackback url: http://pharyngula.org/index/trackback/2071/XvAVO1Cd/

Comments:
#19592: — 03/24  at  09:58 AM
They are beautiful.

One consequence of an unremittingly hard life in the wild is that the survivors are usually endowed with a grace that we rarely see in ourselves. (Although my pampered hound can show it when he goes after a rabbit, so a life in the wild may not be strictly necessary.)



#19593: — 03/24  at  10:09 AM
PZ, have you seen the wonderful zoological-fiction picture book After Man? The premise is that Homo sapiens has gone extinct, and the artist shows what life on Earth is like fifty million years later. One of the critters is a ground-dwelling predator of the bat lineage; it is mostly bipedal, roaming about on a pair of legs that evolved from the ancestral wings, while the former hind legs have been tucked up under the animal's abdomen where they can be used to grasp prey. It's fabulous.

The same artist/author produced The New Dinosaurs (premise: the K-T extinction didn't happen), and Man After Man (premise: civilization falls, and the progeny of the few surviving Homo sapiens undergo explosive evolutionary radiation, producing a vast menagerie of weird critters.



#19594: — 03/24  at  10:21 AM
Why can't I see the picture? It is just a thin grey line. Waah!



's avatar #19595: PZ Myers — 03/24  at  10:28 AM
Because I was bad and left a parameter out of the tag. I fixed it now, so you should be able to see this beautiful predator.

PZ Myers
Division of Science and Math
University of Minnesota, Morris



#19596: — 03/24  at  10:35 AM
Hey, wait a minute! The creationists have assured me that a half-formed wing is useless as either a wing or a leg. So, how are the vampire bats running on their fully formed wings, eh???

One of the cutest sights I have ever seen was a colony of vampire bats in a zoo at feeding time. They were all lined up around a bowl of blood, with their little claws hooked over the rim. There was no pushing and shoving; it was all very polite.



#19599: — 03/24  at  10:46 AM
Thanks, got it now. I hope some horror director sees this, He could make the next Jaws. Is there a bigger version somewhere I could use for wallpaper?



's avatar #19600: — 03/24  at  11:08 AM
ACW, "After man" is fantastic. I liked the aquatic ape.

Quod natura non sunt turpia



#19601: — 03/24  at  11:25 AM
Ever see the mounts in the Dark Crystal?



#19603: — 03/24  at  11:35 AM
huh. looks a bit like what i'd expect a rabbit running backwards to look like, what with the forelimbs doing the work instead of the hindlegs.

thanks for the link, indeed; i had no idea that any bats could walk -- or run -- at all, much less that vampire bats actually hunt that way. there's nothing cooler than learning stuff like this!



#19605: — 03/24  at  11:48 AM
There are two species of short-tailed bats, the Mystacinidae, in New Zealand that are actually primarily ground-dwelling. They live in burrows, and basically scurry around the forest floor at night. They're fast too, from documentary footage. They can fly, but don't seem to do much of it. I guess there wasn't really a lot of competition on the islands they evolved on. There is now, sadly, mostly rats, and one species might be extinct.
But they're nowhere near as graceful or exuberant as the vampires. That little movie and the article made my morning, so thank you, Dr. Myers.



#19607: — 03/24  at  12:07 PM
Their gait makes it seem as if they have "evolved" crutches!

Fascinating, in that the After Man scenario seems to parallel closely some actual situations that have played out in the course of evolution.

It's a classic kick-in-the-face for ID/Creationism - the usage of (relatively) old "stuff" (i.e. wings) for relatively contemporary actions in a single organism.

Brilliant, and thanks, Dr. Myers.

Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

-Jerry Garcia



#19613: Jeremy Osner — 03/24  at  12:46 PM
This gait seems a little like "leap-frogging".



#19620: Rana — 03/24  at  01:25 PM
So. Freakin'. Cool.

(And it would be even if I didn't already like bats.)

I also thought of After Man.

And then the weird riding beasts in The Dark Crystal

(I am nothing if not eclectic in my tastes.)



#19623: — 03/24  at  02:26 PM
Also, underwater bipedal locomotion in octopuses is described in this week's Science.



Trackback: Vampire bats run, octopuses walk Tracked on: Majikthise (66.151.149.25) at 2005 03 24 17:10:27
This just in from Pharyngula: "We knew they could hop and are very fast, but we weren't expecting this. Instead of walking fast, they ran," says Daniel Riskin of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who reports the results in



#19639: bitchphd — 03/24  at  06:01 PM
That makes me so happy.



's avatar #19696: Ben — 03/25  at  03:00 AM
Hey, wait a minute! The creationists have assured me that a half-formed wing is useless as either a wing or a leg. So, how are the vampire bats running on their fully formed wings, eh???

I'm still stuck on visualising two of them in the Ark sucking on Noah's gaping carotid for their daily feed.

"The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them." --Thomas Edison.



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