Its A Bat Eat Bird World

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard, fearless reporters on the dangers of the Animal Uprising™ have some disturbing news for our faithful readers. It seems the bats have taken to eating the birds.

Spanish and Swiss researchers said they had nailed down controversial evidence that one large species of bat preys on little birds as they migrate through the dark of night over the Mediterranean.

They said giant noctule bats, large bats with an 18-inch (45-centimetre) wingspan, were eating mostly insects during the spring but appeared to have a diet heavy in bird meat during the autumn.

No other animal preys on birds that migrate at night, and this species of bat may have switched to this abundant food source recently, they reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.

"In the course of a few million years, bats colonised most ecological niches and learnt to exploit a wide array of food sources including arthropods, pollen, fruit, small terrestrial vertebrates and even blood," Ana Popa-Lisseanu and Carlos Ibanez of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas in Seville, Spain, and colleagues wrote.

Researchers on the team had earlier reported finding bird feathers in the faeces of the bats, creating a storm of controversy, with some biologists saying the bats must have accidentally eaten feathers floating in the air.

Why is this disturbing? Other than the image of a bat with an 18-inch wingspan we mean? Well, that should be obvious. We suspect that the bats are working their way up the food chain, getting larger and larger prey. They're training for attacks on humans.