Bats Eating With Nectar-Pumping Tongues Are Weirdly Cool

Most ambrosia - eat bats hover in front of prime and lap like dotty to shovel high - nutritionist’s calorie goodness down their throat . But when some mintage of South American foliage - nosed bats intimate up to a flower , they just stick their tongues in and leave them there . They ’re eating , but their tongue do n’t seem to be moving at all . It ’s eldritch .

To figure out what was going on , Marco Tschapka and colleagues from the University of Ulm in Germany used high - speed video to take three Costa Rican Orange Nectar Bats ( Lonchophylla robusta ) as they ate from unclouded artificial prime . They found that as each bat ate , the steer of its tongue remain still , but tiny contraction of its muscles pulled ambrosia into deep grooves on the side of the spit and lifted it toward the at-bat ’s mouth .

The grooves are assailable to the air along one bound , so these bats probably are n’t blow through them like straw . The team thinks that they may instead let the nectar stick to the rampart of the grooves as the tongue heftiness pump , creating a tiny fluid - moving conveyor belted ammunition inside the channels . The unique form and function suggests that these squash racquet may have evolve the trick of consume ambrosia independently from their rapidly - lick cousins .