Spectral bat
Vampyrum spectrum
— Where the name comes from
Vampyrum latinises “vampire”, a word Europe took from the Serbian vampir in the 18th century and which naturalists stuck onto half an order of bats out of pure suggestion. Spectrum is the Latin “apparition, spectre”. Two words of ghosts for an animal that does not drink a drop of blood: it hunts birds and rodents and kills them with a bite to the skull, as an owl would.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Bats
- Habitat
- Hollows of great trees in primary rainforest
- Range
- From southern Mexico to Peru and Brazil
- Size
- 12.5–13.5 cm of body, up to 1 m wingspan, 130–190 g
- Diet
- Carnivore — sleeping birds, rodents, other bats, large insects
- Lifespan
- Little known in the wild
— Characteristics
- 01
It is the largest bat in the Americas.
- 02
It finds sleeping birds by smell, not by sonar.
- 03
It lives in stable family groups inside a single hollow tree.
— What sets it apart
It is one of the very few bats in which the male brings food. Pairs stay together for years inside the same cavity with the young of earlier broods, and the male returns at dawn with prey for the nursing female — behaviour documented in captivity and then confirmed in the wild. Among bats, where the norm is that every adult looks after itself, a family that shares food and holds together across generations is almost an exception in its own right.
