{"id":168838,"date":"2024-11-06T01:17:36","date_gmt":"2024-11-06T01:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/06\/putting-vampire-bats-on-treadmills-reveals-an-unusual-metabolism\/"},"modified":"2024-11-06T01:17:37","modified_gmt":"2024-11-06T01:17:37","slug":"putting-vampire-bats-on-treadmills-reveals-an-unusual-metabolism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/06\/putting-vampire-bats-on-treadmills-reveals-an-unusual-metabolism\/","title":{"rendered":"Putting vampire bats on treadmills reveals an unusual metabolism"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><\/div> \r\n<br><br><div data-component=\"video-embed\">\n\t\t\t\t\n\n\n\n\n<p>Vampire bats have become such specialized bloodsuckers that they metabolize their food more like some blood-feeding flies than like other known mammals, a new experiment shows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The common vampire bat <em>(Desmodus rotundus<\/em>) doesn\u2019t stick to flying for moving around. It also scurries along the ground in targeting cattle, horses and other mammals to steal blood. Thus researchers, who were curious about what fuels the animals use, could coax the vampires \u2014 at least for a little while \u2014 to run on a bespoke-for-bats treadmill.<\/p>\n\n\n<aside class=\"sn-conversion rich-text rich-text--with-sidebar\">\n<style><![CDATA[\n.email-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  color: white;\n  margin-top: 50px;\n  background-image: url(\"\/wp-content\/themes\/sciencenews\/client\/src\/images\/cta-module@2x.jpg\");\n  padding: 20px;\n  clear: both;\n}\n\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"rich-text embedded-conversion-content is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container\">\n<style><![CDATA[\n#dynamic-wrapper {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  background-image: url(\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/032624_sb_space-sugar_feat.jpg?w&#61;800&amp;ssl&#61;1\");\n  background-size: cover;\n  background-position: center center;\n  padding: 20px;\n  clear: both;\n}\n\n#dynamic-conversion {\n  padding: 20px;\n  background:rgba(0,0,0, 0.5);\n  color: white;\n}\n\n#dynamic-conversion h2 {\n  color: white;\n}\n\np.has-text-align-center a {\n  color: white !important;\n  text-decoration: none;\n  font-weight: bold;\n}\n\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n<div id=\"dynamic-wrapper\" class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n<div id=\"dynamic-conversion\" class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\"><strong>Tell us about your Science News experience<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">Help us improve by taking our 15-question reader survey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/aside>\n\n\n<p>A substantial portion of the carbon dioxide the bats exhaled during a workout (up to 60 percent) <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1098\/rsbl.2024.0453\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">came from metabolizing fuel other than the carbs or fats<\/a> that typically power a running mammal, the team reports November 6 in <em>Biology Letters<\/em>. Instead, much of the energy bats were using came from a recent high-protein meal of cow blood; the gases contained telltale traces from amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another clue to the fuel a runner is using (the ratio of carbon dioxide exhaled to oxygen used) stayed steady as researchers pushed the treadmill pace from walking to running. That steadiness is a sign that bats weren\u2019t fueling their exertions the usual mammal way. Gas ratios typically change as exercise gets more strenuous and mammals shift from burning mostly lipids to relying more on carbs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The discovery means the vampire bats power along in large part by metabolizing a recent blood meal, much like blood-feeding tsetse flies or some female (and therefore bloodsucking) mosquitoes. That\u2019s a first for mammals, thinks Ken Welch, an ecological physiologist at the University of Toronto. He did the experiments along with physiologist Giulia Rossi, now at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><p>\n<div class=\"youtube-embed\" data-video_id=\"rjBtx8AMR_Q\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"See a vampire bat treadmill workout | Science News\" width=\"696\" height=\"392\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/rjBtx8AMR_Q?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/p><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Researchers put vampire bats through their paces to discover what fuels their metabolism.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The basic bat chemistry isn\u2019t that unusual. \u201cIn most of us mammals,\u201d Welch says, some kind of biochemical pathways can break down amino acids for fuel or some other use, but \u201cthey\u2019re built to slowly churn along in the background.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This fuel source might matter to hibernating bears or overwintering penguins, he says, \u201cbut these are extreme examples.\u201d And even then, the penguins and bears \u201care <em>not<\/em> using amino acids they ingested in a meal only minutes before.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The vampire bat blood diet seems relatively poor in the kinds of nutrients that let most mammals build up their stores of more conventional mammal fuels such as lipids. So it makes sense to Welch that any ancestral ability to use sugar by-products and fats weakened over time in vampire bats. Yet such heavy reliance on amino acids, which aren\u2019t as easy to access quickly, means the bats could be more susceptible to starvation. These vampires get thirsty often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n<br>\r\n<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/vampire-bats-treadmills-metabolism\">Source link <\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vampire bats have become such specialized bloodsuckers that they metabolize their food more like some blood-feeding flies than like other known mammals, a new experiment shows. The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) doesn\u2019t stick to flying for moving around. It also scurries along the ground in targeting cattle, horses and other mammals to steal blood. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168839,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/110524-sm-bat-metabolism-feat.jpg?fit=680%2C428&ssl=1","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[16042,15858,3225,1185,33414,12012,49854],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168838"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168838"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168840,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168838\/revisions\/168840"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}