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Rats caught on camera hunting flying bats (2025)

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45730366

Rats are the best! :)

While predation by rats is curious news, much more common (here in the US at least) is predation by raccoons.

Conservation-minded management practice is often to build a "bat friendly" gate at the entrance of a significant bat cave or an abandoned mine portal. These gates are the ideal perch for hungry raccoons to pluck bats right out of the air. Bats emerge from entrances like this near the ceiling, when possible, specifically to avoid predators. Poorly designed gates are the opposite of "bat friendly" and turn the safe entrances into buffets for raccoons.

Why do we care about protecting bats? They're the #1 predator for night-flying insects, which are often crop destroying pests. Every bat we lose equals more chemical pesticide that farmers must use to efficiently grow crops.

27 days agoby driggs

I'm not sure if I'd call it full-fledged PTSD, but I have some guilt associated with an incident of a rat invasion in my house. We initially used glue traps with the hope that we'd catch the rats and maybe be able to release them outside. What happened instead is that one of the rats was caught, chewed its arm off to escape, bled all over my house, and eventually died.

I don't like rats, and I don't really even have a huge issue with killing them, but I certainly don't want to torture them. If I had used a snap trap, the rat would be dead in about a second. With the glue trap he was suffering for hours, probably in immense pain.

I don't think rats are cute anymore and I'm not sure that glue traps should be legal.

26 days agoby tombert

This research was from northern Germany and I am wondering if it is something which has gotten as far as Berlin because we used to have a bat population across from our house due to a location near a park and cemetery. Since last summer the bats seem gone (and mosquito population much on the rise).

27 days agoby oezi

I suspect this behaviour has been going on for centuries, even millennia, just that no one has been in the position to see or film it.

Some people pointed out on the other thread that the rat would be near blind, but they also have excellent hearing and sense of smell to work around that.

27 days agoby nephihaha

Go to the larder, Ratty! Go to the larder! It's where the grub is. Clever fellas.

27 days agoby kayo_20211030

(2025)

27 days agoby meken