A high-sugar diet is bad news for humans, leading to diabetes, obesity and even cancer. Yet fruit bats survive and even thrive by eating up to twice their body weight in sugary fruit every day.
Plants & Animals
Jan 9, 2024
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73
Vampire bats may soon take up residence in the United States and bring with them an ancient pathogen. "What we found was that the distribution of vampire bats has moved northward across time due to past climate change, which ...
Ecology
Nov 27, 2023
2
88
Mammals usually mate via penetrative sex, but researchers report Nov. 20 in the journal Current Biology that a species of bat, the serotine bat, (Eptesicus serotinus) mates without penetration. This is the first time non-penetrative ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 20, 2023
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2
The scientific community and the public alike have often been presented with portrayals of bats as carriers of numerous dangerous viruses that are passed onto humans. In a paper published in Biology Letters, an international ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 17, 2023
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70
Ask a biologist why predators don't exterminate all their prey, and part of the answer is often that there is an ongoing arms race between predators and prey, with both parties continuously evolving new ways to cheat each ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 27, 2023
0
95
They don't know it, but Darwin's finches changed the world. These closely related species—native to the Galapagos Islands—each sport a uniquely shaped beak that matches their preferred diet. Studying these birds helped ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 26, 2023
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16
Of all the mammals, bats have one of the poorest fossil records, with paleontologists estimating that about 80% of it is missing.
Evolution
Oct 19, 2023
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109
The extraordinary lifespans of bats could be under threat from rising global temperatures, according to new research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Plants & Animals
Oct 17, 2023
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20
A large team of international researchers have used techniques at ANSTO's Australian Synchrotron to understand how key proteins contribute to the virulence of the rabies virus, sometimes called the "zombie virus."
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 29, 2023
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1
A new paper titled "Long-read sequencing reveals rapid evolution of immunity and cancer-related genes in bats" in Genome Biology and Evolution shows that rapid evolution in bats may account for the animals' extraordinary ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 20, 2023
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