Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [97]
Although I’m unaware of any studies on this issue, it’s likely that blood feeders also serve an additional ecological role: namely, to cull out the old and the sick from prey or host populations. A moose that is able to emerge alive from a winter’s stint as a “ghost moose” might very well be carrying around a genetic blueprint with an amped-up emphasis on surviving harsh conditions (especially since the ticks do not feed on the moose during the summer). On the other hand, moose that die from winter tick infestations apparently do so from starvation (distracted from feeding by all that grooming and rubbing). Hypothetically at least, not only might that moose be carrying “inferior” genes, but its death would leave more food for heartier individuals and those unaffected by the tick onslaught.
Rather than wishing for blood-feeding creatures to disappear, or starting to twitch at their very mention, we should be dealing with the fact that vampires are here and they’re probably here to stay. In that regard, some of these blood-feeding creatures, like mosquitoes, can be deadly enemies and should be treated as such—although I am certainly not advocating the wholesale application of pesticides. Other sanguivores, like the common vampire bat, bed bugs, ticks, and chiggers, can become serious problems—some of them with the potential to sicken or even kill us. We should keep in mind, however, that in most cases these vampires would rather be feeding on something other than humans and it’s generally our fault when we encounter them.
Then there are blood feeders that have a high gross-out quotient but are basically harmless (at least to humans). Leeches fall neatly into this category, as do candirus (except on extremely rare occasions).
Finally, there are some vampires that will certainly require our help if they are to avoid extinction over the next few decades. The bird-biting vampire bats Diaemus and Diphylla immediately come to mind. In my opinion, even if you’re not a fan of these creatures, with only five thousand species of mammals, we should not stand by as two of them disappear forever. It should also be stressed that conservation measures shouldn’t be limited to vertebrate blood feeders. As researchers like Mark Siddall have recently shown, there are invertebrate species, such as the misclassified leech Hirudo verbana, that appear to have squirmed through the cracks in our wildlife protection laws.
In the words of Edward O. Wilson:
We should judge every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity. We should not knowingly allow any species or race to go extinct. And let us go beyond mere salvage to begin the restoration of natural environments, in order to enlarge wild populations and stanch the hemorrhaging of biological wealth. There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.
The tragedy of extinction is that not only do organisms disappear before we know the answers to our questions, they sometimes disappear before we know the right questions to ask.
NOTES
1: WALLERFIELD
In 1933 Greenhall and Raymond Ditmars Raymond L. Ditmars and Arthur M. Greenhall, “The Vampire Bat—A Presentation of Undescribed Habits and Review of Its History,” Zoologica 4 (1935): 53–76.
Heavily loaded down after a blood meal J. Scott Altenbach, Locomotor Morphology of the Vampire Bat, Desmodus rotundus, Special Pub. No. 6, American Society of Mammalogists (Lawrence, Kans.: 1979), 19–30.
It had taken me six months William A. Schutt Jr., John Hermanson, Young-Hui Chang, Dennis Cullinane, J. Scott Altenbach, Farouk Muradali, and John Bertram, “Functional Morphology of the Common Vampire Bat, Desmodus rotundus,” Journal of Experimental Biology 200, no. 23 (1977): 3003–12.
In 1941 Captain Lloyd Gates David E. Brown, Vampiro—The Vampire Bat in Fact and Fantasy (Silver City, N. Mex.: High-Lonesome