Rats filmed snatching bats from air
60 comments
·October 28, 2025neom
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.
terminalshort
How do you think he got so chonky?
nortlov
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.
embedding-shape
> 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.
nortlov
You might be right. The paper mentioned the rats preferred hunting near the light barrier but also mentioned they probably climbed the fabric for an aerial advantage (they didn’t seem to prefer hunting near the light barrier once the fabric was removed).
neom
That's right, rats eyes are mostly rod based, they are very optimized for contrast shifts in extremely low light. They're also mostly colour blind.
neom
I don't see how a new path for pathogen transmission is available?
mikeyouse
Not necessarily a new path, but a previously unknown path. Any place that bats directly interact with ‘land mammals’ leads to a mess of viral recombination and reassortment… hence why the agriculture/wild interface in China is the site of so many spillovers. Rats especially carry similar viruses with many features that increase tropism, so the fact that rats are feeding on bats means we’re going to get a ton of crossover viruses especially well suited for transmission in mammals.
One such study’s key paragraph…
> While uncommon for coronaviruses of bats, furin cleavage sites are commonly found in coronaviruses of rodents and it is perhaps fitting to note that proteolytic processing of the coronavirus spike protein was first recognized in the model rodent coronavirus, murine hepatitis virus, MHV-A59 [53], with later analyses demonstrating the importance of furin for the proteolytic cleavage and function of its spike protein [54].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235277142...
neom
I don't think that is possible in practice? Rats and Bats diverged some 60 million years ago, they're far too host specific for anything new, and they have the same coevolution as bats to paramyxo and coronaviruses, I would presume that makes them immunologically resistant and ecologically poor hosts for any strains.
Edit, in fact the paper you link says exactly what I said I think? Rodent coronaviruses already evolved to use furin long ago. I think this paper just makes it even less likely tbh.
chairmansteve
Last week I saw a couple of small hawks attacking a bat swarm as they came out of their cave at sunset. Less of a transmission vector probably, but there seems to be a lot more interaction between bats and other animals than I thought. I wonder if domestic cats attack bats.
riversflow
> I wonder if domestic cats attack bats.
I have no doubt. Cats have an incredible prey drive, and it would be down right batty for them to have some sort of hardwiring to avoid bats when they happily attack moths who have a similar flight pattern. I haven’t personally seen one catch a bat, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all. A cursory search says indicates it happens.
Although for whatever reason I would be more concerned about a dog finding, rubbing in and eating a dead bat. I mean I don’t know what percentage of bats die while out, but it can’t be zero, and dogs—especially spitz-types—are remarkable at finding dead animals. Now that I think of it, I could easily imagine a person getting direct exposure to diseased bat remains through that vector. People typically put their hands on the shoulders of dogs and think little of it.
echelon
Bats are one of the largest disease reservoirs on the planet for all kinds nasty novel viruses that could potentially jump to humans.
Bats have crazy immune systems that let them harbor all kinds of nasty stuff without it killing them on account of their unclean communal living habitat. Bats are in close contact where waste and bodily fluids are constantly coming into contact with other members, and these all carry pathogens.
Bat immune systems evolved as a defense mechanism. Bat viral loads are high, and the viruses get to evolve rapidly, come into contact with other virus genomes, and essentially explore the state space of potential virus genomes quickly. Constantly evolving novel glycoproteins, etc. Bats are essentially a virus optimization battleground.
These rats are an invasive species (to the cave) that also live in close proximity to humans. They've just been discovered hunting bats, meaning they're coming into close contact with bat viruses and potentially serving to introduce these into rat and, possibly subsequently, human populations.
Additionally, if the viruses can jump to rats, they're in a state where they could already be primed to infect us.
Bat viruses are no joke. Since our immune systems aren't familiar with novel viruses, and the viruses aren't adapted to not kill their human hosts at first, novel bat viruses can do a lot of harm.
navigate8310
Are bat reservoirs an interesting way to study novel virus especially for easy preemptive discovery of anti-virus?
lurquer
What’s so ‘new’ about it?
vasco
> and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission
Presumably it's been there for a long time and we just noticed.
spankibalt
> "Presumably it's been there for a long time and we just noticed."
We just noticed bat snatching. I doubt it's new discovery that rats also eat bats whenever the opportunity comes knocking.
Also: Bats -> rats -> (house) cats -> humans.
chairmansteve
>Presumably it's been there for a long time and we just noticed.
As a previous commenter noted, rats are an invasive species in the expanding human/wildland interface. So they will be encountering novel bat viruses.
There may be other existing bat to human transmission paths, but maybe not....
TacticalCoder
> - 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.
chairmansteve
>on the bright side
I wouldn't be so confident. HIV and Ebola came from the wild. Bird Flu also has the potential to be really bad.
shaneofalltrad
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.
SoftTalker
Hm, maybe I should get some rats to keep the mice out of my house. Of course then I'd have rats.
mikkupikku
Get yourself a nice black rat snake. (Unironically, it drives me up a wall when I hear about people trying to exterminate snakes and spiders; the only reason those are around is because their food is.)
marcosdumay
> the only reason those are around is because their food is
For some reason everybody in my city is proudly boasting bout the recent large capybara population... And again, for some reason those same people didn't react well when jaguars decided to show up in the urban area.
People are stupid.
chairmansteve
I have a black widow problem. Their food is flying insects.... Any tips?
ipaddr
If you have mice you won't have rats. Mice can be a positive sign.
delichon
I have both. I've trapped both in the same trap on the same night.
wiether
Next step: get some turtles!
3rodents
[dead]
3rodents
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.
shadyKeystrokes
[dead]
nine_k
The question "do rats eat bats?" sounds like taken straight from Alice In Wonderland, and now, disturbingly, we know that the answer is positive.
riazrizvi
If you like the idea of vicious rats, read British horror writer James Herbert’s The Rats.
null
whatever1
How do I know this is not Sora?
0_____0
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.
embedding-shape
> 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.
AKA "Provenance" but digital, for those who want to look at existing methodologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provenance
shadyKeystrokes
[dead]
skylurk
Additionally, in a very concrete technical sense, "whatever1" must rely on the "chain of reputation" of the https certificate system to have confidence that what they saw is not sora.
pizzly
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.
skylurk
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?
hyghjiyhu
This is an important analysis to perform but it's far from a sure thing. Motives can be murky and hard to assess. Maybe there is one particular scientist that has a baby on the way and fears he is about to be laid off unless he can get a sensational article published asap. A little helping hand from ai could be just the thing, and it's based on a true story just touched up a little bit and besides it's not like the readers will suffer any real harm from this tiny little transgression. Just one little shortcut one little time off course after that it's right back to honest science.
puttycat
Game theory or Bayesian inference?
skylurk
I'm an expert in neither, but I would say both?
I thought of game theory initially because I framed the situation as a repeated game, where every article published is a new round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeated_game
But then I went and muddied it with the word "likelihood" :)
ceroxylon
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.
phendrenad2
The food chain myth destroyed so many people's minds. Wait until you hear that deer eat mice.
Traubenfuchs
Horses eat chicks.
SubiculumCode
great another disease vector from bats.
zeristor
“Rat Eat Bat” is a more succinct title.
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.