These Lazy Bats Are Super-Efficient Killers That Carefull...

What’s Happening

Alright so Wild fringe-lipped bats spend just one-tenth of the night in flight, but they can precisely snatch a calling frog and nab prey that rivals their own size These Lazy Bats Are Super-Efficient Killers That Carefully Conserve Energy to Attack at a Moments Notice Wild fringe-lipped bats spend just one-tenth of the night in flight, but they can precisely snatch a calling frog and nab prey that rivals their own size Joshua Rapp Learn - Contributing Writer Get our !

Scientists found that fringe-lipped bats have a roughly 50 percent success rate when trying to capture prey. Grant Maslowski In the pursuit of radio-tagged bats, Leonie Baier has gotten her truck stuck in the mud in the middle of the jungle with no cellphone reception. (and honestly, same)

She has waited patiently outside a cave for an entire night, a beeping signal on her tracking device indicating the creature was close—only to realize the following morning that the flying mammal had been in a different cave nearby.

The Details

She has waded neck-deep into a flooded underground passage, sometimes diving under root clusters to reach her quarries. That’s because she must collect the tracking devices glued to the bats if she hopes to recover the precious data contained on them.

“I do anything I can to get that logger back,” says Baier, of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands. Now, these investigations her colleagues have spilled an “entirely surprising” result: The predatory fringe-lipped bats they work so hard to find are much more successful at catching their targets than the researchers are at capturing them.

Why This Matters

While Baier sometimes struggles to find a bat she knows is tantalizingly close, the animals are highly accurate hunters when they leave their roosts to snag a meal, despite sometimes putting in little effort. In a study published just in Current Biology , the team found fringe-lipped bats have a more than 50 percent success rate in capturing their prey and waste little energy doing it.

The scientific community tends to find developments like this significant.

The Bottom Line

This story is still developing, and we’ll keep you updated as more info drops.

What’s your take on this whole situation?