Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
People love bacon. It’s widely consumed, it gets added to things like ice cream and pizza crust (praise the gods), it’s inspired a long line of Internet memes, and was even given its very own holiday. But as it turns out, humans aren’t the only ones with a taste for bacon.
Writing in a recent edition of the Journal of Mammalogy, researchers from the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil analyzed the feces of vampire bats to find the favored prey of the creatures and found that they also seem to have a taste for “the other white meat.” It sounds like redOrbit has something in common with vampire bats.
Searching for bacon bits in vampire bat feces
The study authors explained that they studied DNA fragments found in vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) droppings to discover exactly what the creatures preferred to dine on. Morphological identification of the prey fragments would normally be impossible, however, because of the bats’ exclusive blood-based diet.
So, they modified an existing technique and used it to isolate and amplify the genetic material of five potential prey species in the bat feces (chickens, pigs, dogs, cattle, and humans), according to Science. The team then spent a total of 47 nights in 18 villages in the Amazon region, capturing and collecting scat samples from a total of 157 vampire bats.
Over 60 percent of the viable samples collected contained chicken DNA, with pig DNA showing up in approximately 30 percent of them. While the bats ate more chicken, they also had greater access to chicken than pigs. Once the authors adjusted the results based on the availability of the respective animals, they calculated that vampire bats actually preferred pork.
Not eating it for the flavor
In fact, the Brazilian researchers calculated that vampire bats were actually seven times more likely to feed on pigs than the availability of the creatures would indicate. So why do they seem to seek out these creatures? Experts believe that it is because the bats’ saliva has an easier time liquefying mammal blood, and because pigs have a high concentration of red blood cells.
“This project that they did was my dream,” Gerry Carter, a University of Maryland graduate student who was not involved in the new research but who had conducted similar research as an undergraduate in the past, told Science. “I wanted to go to the Amazon and apply this technique. Ten years later, to see this applied in the field is great.”
Carter added that he was surprised that they were able to extract DNA from the samples, since precious little genetic material is able to survive the digestive process. The key, according to the website, was refrigerating the samples as quickly as possible after capture. In their analysis, the authors also found no evidence of human DNA in the feces of the wild vampire bats, so we’re safe (for now).
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