Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [25]
“Yes?” Farouk’s Trinidadian accent made it sound more like yes-ah.
“Farouk?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to believe what we just saw.”
Silence.
“I think Diaemus is mimicking chicks. They’re snuggling right up to these hens—then biting them on the chest. It’s unfriggin-believable!”
Silence.
“Farouk?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever seen that before?”
“Yes. The bites are on the brood patch.”
“Oh…Cool. Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Yes.” Click.
I’ve always considered my friend Farouk Muradali to be one of the most generous and nurturing people I’ve ever met. But to say that he is a man of few words…well, you get the picture.
My collaborators and I also learned from the start that Arthur Greenhall had been right about the significant differences that existed between vampire bat species (in our case, between Desmodus rotundus and Diaemus youngi)—and we would discover that most of this variation was related to the bat’s preference for either mammalian or avian blood, respectively.
“Diaemus doesn’t jump,” Farouk had said (in what would become his equivalent of the Gettysburg Address). And after a hundred-plus trials on our miniature force platform, we had to agree. But why was this so?
Initially, we tested our system out with the common vampire bat, Desmodus, and as in previous studies, we confirmed that these bats could make spectacular, acrobatic jumps, in any direction. Pushing off the ground with their powerful pectoral muscles, Desmodus used its elongated thumbs (the last things to leave the ground) to impart precise direction to jumps that could reach three feet in height.
These amazing jumps, along with their ability to run at speeds of up to two meters per second, were adaptations for terrestrial blood feeding. They enabled the common vampire bat to escape predators, avoid being crushed by their relatively enormous prey, and initiate flight after a blood meal. The ability to feed efficiently on large quadrupeds is the primary reason why Desmodus rotundus has been so successful in terms of numbers and range, but in all likelihood this success was a rather recent development.
Until about five hundred years ago, Desmodus rotundus may have been anything but “common.” In fact, populations would have been severely restricted not only by climate but by the finite number of large mammals that were present in any given area. Quite possibly the vampires would have been compelled (as they sometimes are today) to feed on smaller mammals as well as birds and other vertebrates like snakes and lizards.
Starting in the early 1500s, however, the influx of Europeans and their domestic animals into the Neotropics would have spelled big changes for Desmodus, as well as the other two vampire genera. Suddenly, enormous four-footed feeding stations would have sprung up in places where the pickings might have previously been sparse for thousands of years. Additionally, not only would there have been plenty of new animals to prey upon, many of these quadrupedal blood bags would have been penned in, making them super easy to find and ultimately making meal time a whole lot more predictable than it had ever been before. Populations of the opportunistic Desmodus would have exploded as more and more land was cleared for cattle farming. The more cows, pigs, and horses, the larger the vampire bat populations that could be sustained by their blood. Human victims weren’t necessarily preferred, but they did give the vampires additional opportunities to feed, long before windows, screens, and protective netting would keep them at bay.
From the standpoint of the newly arrived humans, it must have seemed like yet another plague had descended upon them, for with the mysterious nocturnal attacks and the gruesome postbite cleanup came diseases, rabies being the most