bat
bleimanb | November 3, 2009Oral sex is a rarity in the animal kingdom with just a handful of species (humans, bonobos) who participate in the act. Well, move over high-functioning primates because there's a new, high-fellating mammal on the bj circuit, the short-nosed fruit bat. Yeah, we get it, "short-nosed..." We seriously can't make this stuff up.
Random Fact #265: Due to the terms of his Federal plea bargain, Andrew is actually not allowed to watch this video!
Apparently, according to the paper recently published in PLoS ONE, about 70% of female short-nosed fruit bats engage in oral sex with their partners.…
edyong | October 27, 2009Many humans whinge about not getting oral sex often enough, but for most animals, it's completely non-existent. In fact, we know of only animal apart from humans to regularly engage in fellatio - the short-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus sphinx).
The bat's sexual antics have only just been recorded by Min Tan of China's Guangdong Entomological Institute (who are either branching out, or are confused about entomology). Tan captured 60 wild bats from a nearby park, housed them in pairs of the opposite sex and voyeuristically filmed their liaisons using a night-time camera. Twenty of the bats got…
zooillogix | September 25, 2009They're nocturnal. They live in caves. They use ecolocution.
BREAKING NEWS: BAT LOOSE IN CONGRESS
grrlscientist | September 22, 2009tags: bat, congress, offbeat, humor, funny, satire, streaming video
In this breaking news video, we see that Congress is deadlocked on the best way to get a bat out of their committee chamber.
edyong | September 9, 2009When food is precious, animals can resort to strange behaviours in order to satisfy their hunger. Take the great tit. Its usual diet of insects and creepy-crawlies is harder to come by in winter. But in one Hungarian cave, great tits, ever the opportunists, have learned to exploit a rich and unusual source of food. They kill sleeping bats.
Great tits are only about 5 inches long, but their prey - the pipistrelle bat - is smaller still, just an inch or two in size. The bats spend the winter months hibernating in rock crevices. They're well hidden, but when they wake up, they start making…
bleimanb | September 4, 2009Ok, so here's the deal. I love bats. Always have. Always will. In fact, until I was about 14, I wanted to be a bat scientist. I then realized that bat scientists have to take a lot of classes that require a lot of lab work and I hastily changed my goal to becoming a bar owner. I'm not sure when National Geographic first posted this, but it is a pretty sweet interactive website where you can listen to different Panamanian bats' beautiful songs. I'm trying to get one as my ring tone. Can anyone help me do that? My favorite is the black myotis bat and if you help me make that my ring tone, I…
edyong | August 26, 2009When sportsmen use rackets or bats, their best bet is to hit a ball on the "sweet spot", the point where various forces balance out to deliver powerful blows with only very small forces on the wielder's wrist. Engineers have the right tools and models to work out where this spot lies on their instruments. Now, palaeontologists have used the same techniques to study biological hammers that adorn the tails of giant prehistoric armadillos called glyptodonts.
At first glance, glyptodonts have little in common with the likes of Andy Murray and Roger Federer. These armoured beasts lived in the…
neurophilosophy | July 17, 2009BATS use sonar, or echolocation, to navigate complex environments, and also to forage and then accurately pinpoint the flying insects on which they prey. Insects in turn have evolved various counter-measures to evade capture. Some species have ears which are in tune to the echolocation signals, while others are capable of performing complex evasive flight maneuvers in response to the clicks produced by attacking bats.
Tiger moths have evolved the ability to produce ultrasonic clicks in response to attacking bats. However, the function of these clicks was unclear, although decades of research…
edyong | July 17, 2009
Bats view the world in echoes, timing the reflections of their own ultrasonic calls to navigate and hunt. This biological sonar, or echolocation, has made them masters of the night sky; it's so sensitive that some species take moths and other insects on the wing, while others pluck spiders from their webs without entangling themselves in silk. But with such an efficient technology, it was only a matter of time before their quarry developed countermeasures.
Some insects gained ears; others simply rely on outmanoeuvring their attackers. But one group, the tiger moths, play bats at their own…
bioephemera | February 27, 2009
Yup, that's a flying bat gripping a lamp in its mouth, with his buddy, a coiled snake, crawling along above him. And it's not a faux-Victorian, nouveau-Goth creation - it's a replica of an actual late 1800s fixture, by eclectic lighting company Rejuvenation. Seriously - over a hundred years ago, someone thought this was the greatest lamp evah! I'm not sure I'd actually choose the Dracula-esque Drake fixture for myself, mind you; not only is it more than $2K, I think you need a very special space for this 45" long creation. Like a living room designed by Edward Gorey. But if you've got that…
grrlscientist | January 16, 2008tags: bat, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Unknown species (to me) of Bat at rest,
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the NYC uptown subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008 [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
grrlscientist | January 15, 2008tags: bat, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Unknown species (to me) of Bat in flight,
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the NYC uptown subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008 [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
bleimanb | September 25, 2007Ok, so there isn't much scientific merit to this, but who cares? Bats are my (Benny's) favorite animals! This shot of an insectivorous bat won the prestigious British Visions of Science and Technology award. Keep reading for some more sweet zoological shots from the competition's "Short List," and definitely check out their website.
Said bat's lovable claw.
A vicious Weddell seal
Female Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus)
zooillogix | June 25, 2007A Maclaud's horseshoe bat (being held in a glove) poses for the ladies...
For the first time, scientists photographed a Maclaud's horseshoe bat in the forests of Guinea in West Africa. These bats had not been seen in the wild in over 40 years. The featured photo was snapped by German biologist Natalie Webber, who found 16 horseshoe bats living in a remote cave complex. "Our rediscovery is good news insofar as the species is still there and as we have shown that the distribution range appears to be somewhat larger than previously known," said Jakob Fahr, a German ecologist who headed up the…
zooillogix | May 15, 2007Good God Almighty....(From Sir David Attenborough's "Life in the Undergrowth")
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zooillogix | April 9, 2007Late last year, scientists discovered a new species of bat that has large flat adhesive suckers attached to its thumbs and hind feet. These suckers allow the bat to climb and adhere to large broad-leaf plants in the jungles of their native Madagascar.
The find is particularly remarkable because the new bat belongs to a Family of bats, Myzopoda, that was previously considered to include a single rare species. In a rare success story, these endangered bats are thriving in recently cleared forests where the pioneering Traveler's Palm often replaces native vegetation after logging. The plant has…
zooillogix | March 8, 2007We had a bat house hanging from the second story of my home growing up. My brother loved bats and I fully endorsed sharing our home with them. These critters might be a different story.
Bat species, like many creatures, can be difficult to tell apart based purely on physiology. These new bats were recently identified as unique species by using DNA barcoding and immediately prepped for inclusion in female nightmares.
trachops cirrhosus
myotis riparious
platyrrhinus helleri
Our friends here are native to camping areas in the Midwest and various alleys on the Lower East Side of Manhattan...