Friends help female vampire bats cope with loss

Female vampire bats form strong social bonds with their mothers and daughters as they groom and share regurgitated meals of blood. They also form friendships with less closely related bats. Gerry Carter, post-doctoral fellow ...

Herpes not quite so species specific after all

A new study challenges the tenet of herpes viruses being strictly host-specific. Scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Germany have discovered that gammaherpesviruses switch their hosts ...

Rabies could spread to Peru's coast by 2020

Rabies will likely reach the Pacific Coast of Peru—where the virus currently does not occur—within four years, according to a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Are vampire bats nature's misunderstood monsters?

Werewolves, ghosts, and vampires—with the days getting shorter and colder, and Halloween fast approaching, our imaginations turn to the ghouls that supposedly come out around this time of year. Vampires, one of history's ...

Vampire squid discovery shows how little we know of the deep sea

Among soft-bodied cephalopods, vampire squid live life at a slower pace. At ocean depths from 500 to 3,000 meters, they don't swim so much as float, and they get by with little oxygen while consuming a low-calorie diet of ...

Virus in bats homologous to retroviruses in rodents and primates

Scientists discovered a new retrovirus "fossil" found in the common vampire bat which is homologous to retroviruses in rodents and primates. The results suggest the recent circulation of an active infectious retrovirus and ...

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