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I've kept rats my whole life and on one hand I'm not surprised, they'll eat what seems like literally anything, on the other hand they seriously pick their battles, a rat isn't going to engage with anything it's unaware of, they have extreme neophobia so I'm somewhat surprised this rat felt the situation out enough that it was comfortable doing this, I'd guess it had spent a lot of time around the bats, also surprising because the rat is a bit on the chonky side to be opportunistically hunting that way. Interesting.
How do you think he got so chonky?
My rats were very picky eaters. The inside of a cucumber slice would be eaten leaving the skin behind for example.
Unlike bats, cucumber slices can be easily transported to a safe eating place, rarely fight back, and are ideally suitable for precision nibbling.
The skin of cucurbits is usually fairly high in cucurbitacins (usually much higher than the flesh).
The rats here at Lund University hunt pigeons, friend of a friend took a video of a successful hunt just the other week, totally nuts. They wait in the bushes below the trees on campus, pounce on the pigeons when they land on the ground.
Would you like to share the video?
Two thoughts come to mind:

- the rats are effectively as blind as the bat in the dark, are they relying purely on sound and air currents to gauge their attack?

- and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission.

> the rats are effectively as blind as the bat in the dark

Are they? Aren't rats nocturnal in the first place, meaning evolution should have given them some benefit in that environment? AFAIK, rats have pretty OK contrast/motion detection even in low light situations.

I guess if "in the dark" means "low light" or "total darkness". You're probably right for "total darkness" but if it's "low light", I think the rats would "see" better than the bats.

This is the funny thing about echolocation in the dark-- it gives the bat's position away to the rat as well.
> and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission

Presumably it's been there for a long time and we just noticed.

> 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.
I don't see how a new path for pathogen transmission is available?
What’s so ‘new’ about it?
> - and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission.

on the bright side and if history is of any help, as long as future-to-be-debarred "experts" aren't doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses while lying about it, we don't have much to fear.

Official US Congress report, mandated under Biden and whose results came under Biden, says the virus has "characteristic not found in nature" and that a lab-leak is the most likely source:

https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...

And Peter Daszak has been debarred, defunded and prevented from ever receiving funding from the US again.

I'm more worried about humans lying and humans siding with lying humans to then lie some more, worldwide, to the public --for years before the truth finally came up to light-- much more than I'm about rats attacking bats.

> 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.

Textbook example of the blind eating the blind.

The question "do rats eat bats?" sounds like taken straight from Alice In Wonderland, and now, disturbingly, we know that the answer is positive.
I was trying to remember if it was "do cats eat bats" or "do rats eat bats." Turns out it was cats, and once again reality is stranger than fiction. :D

“And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.”

― Lewis Carroll Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

Rats are extremely predatory, I once as a kid worked at a Reptile importer and a handful of rats escaped, they destroyed the mice from under their screen/grated cages. Almost as traumatic as when I learned how to dispatch an adult rat on the side of the table before feeding it off to the reptiles at 15 years old.
Rats are not predatory, they’re resourceful. You didn’t witness what rats do in the wild, you witnessed abused rats doing whatever they could to survive. Rats will eat mice if they need to but they will not seek them out when other food sources are available. You can’t judge the behavior of rodents when they are feeders. Mice would do the same thing. As would you and I.
Hm, maybe I should get some rats to keep the mice out of my house. Of course then I'd have rats.
> The behavior is all the more impressive given that the rodents hunt at night, when they are effectively blind

I can't access the paper to check if they verified it, but given there is a strong IR light, and even humans can see IR light if strong enough (and close enough in frequency, which is typically true for IR illumination for cameras), I wonder if that is true.

If you like the idea of vicious rats, read British horror writer James Herbert’s The Rats.
The food chain myth destroyed so many people's minds. Wait until you hear that deer eat mice.
Horses eat chicks.

https://youtu.be/ZnYNmGMsU18

Or that chicken eat chicken.
I played bass for Snatching Bats
Never underestimate a rat
Rough life inside a cave.
weird my IP is blocked according to science.org website
When mammals hunt other mammals strange things can happen.
Covid-200
How do I know this is not Sora?
Chain of reputation. If you can trace back the claim to a person or persons who have reputation to stake on this, then it's unlikely to be completely fabricated.

There are tech-related ways to tell for now but eventually it's going to come back to this.

One angle could be to consider it from a game theory perspective.

Is this the sort of organisation that would be negatively impacted by publishing unverified stories?

If so, what is the likelihood that the content is just Sora?

It is good to be skeptical, but there is a large amount of detail in the paper itself that would have taken quite a bit of effort to fabricate (for no good reason): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198942...

There is enough detail there to book a trip to Germany and set up infrared cameras if we are so inclined, repeatability is a large part of science.

Because the person filming it brought the camera with approved government ID. Got their camera serial number recorded in the government database. The camera then embeds its serial number into the video using hidden watermarks. Just Joking .... for now.
Sora is too smooth
what about bats make them good carriers for disease?
great another disease vector from bats.
“Rat Eat Bat” is a more succinct title.
Why is this surprising, aren't rats used to torture?
rats !heart bats
Fucker, another reason to eradicate the pest.