Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [106]
FOOTNOTES
*1 There is no truth to the rumor that bats can carry the rabies virus without becoming sick themselves.
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*2 Vampires are alternatively described as “sanguivorous” or “hematophagous.”
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*3 Perhaps because of its isolated location, there have been a number of serious crimes associated with this undeniably spooky site (which the American military referred to as Waller Field). In any event, visiting the ruins at night or alone is not recommended.
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*4 I would later learn that the elevator shaft was filled with a combination of bat urine, guano, and rainwater.
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*5 Art Greenhall told me that the same grim methods had been employed in Venezuela, where nearly a million bats were killed annually from 1964 through 1966.
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*6 Lightweight and perfect for handling small flying mammals or moving through a thorn-laden forest, I’m still amazed that some people cling to the belief that these gloves were named for America’s national pastime.
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*7 Fossil evidence indicates that insects may have forged a relationship with flowering plants (angiosperms) soon after the latter appeared, some 120–130 million years ago. The first bats (which were insect eaters), as well as the ancestors of modern hummingbirds, appear to have evolved around the time that the nonavian dinosaurs (and significantly, their flying cousins, the pterosaurs) went extinct, around 65 million years ago. With pterosaurs no longer filling the aerial vertebrate niches, birds and bats underwent a rapid diversification.
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*8 Think of where the baggage and cargo are stored in an airplane, or alternately, how no one fights to get the turkey’s back at Thanksgiving dinner.
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†9 PAX sits perched atop a hill overlooking the Caroni Plain, and is located on the grounds of a Benedictine monastery. Our friends there, Gerard Ramsawak and his lovely wife, Oda, had set up a wonderfully serviceable lab for us in what doubled for a garage. After recording a series of measurements and tracing wing shapes, Janet and I would wait until dark before releasing the bats into the night.
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*10 There are, however, literally thousands of invertebrates that have evolved to feed solely on blood.
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*11 Like other carnivores, Vampyrum ingests blood, but not as a sole source of nutrition.
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*12 In 1893 the last piece of vampire bat puzzle was completed when the third vampire, Diaemus youngi, was identified. By this time scientists had finally figured out that the bat they were describing actually fed on blood.
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*13 Admittedly, this is rather bizarre behavior on the part of the common vampire bat and its collector. As anyone who has observed these creatures in the field knows, vampire bats are unbelievably secretive—especially, it seems, around humans. Why then, did this particular bat