Anatomy
Unlike fruit-eating bats, the vampire bat has a short, conical muzzle. It also lacks a nose leaf, instead having naked pads with U-shaped grooves at the tip. The common vampire bat also has specialized thermoreceptors on its nose, which aid the animal in locating areas where the blood flows close to the skin of its prey. A nucleus has been found in the brain of vampire bats that has a similar position and similar histology to the infrared receptor of infrared-sensing snakes.
A vampire bat generally has small ears and a short tail. Its front teeth are specialized for cutting and the back teeth are much smaller than in other bats. The inferior colliculus, the part of the bat's brain that processes sound, is well adapted to detecting the regular breathing sounds of sleeping animals that serve as its main food source.
While other bats have almost lost the ability to maneuver on land, vampire bats can also run by using a unique, bounding gait, in which the forelimbs instead of the hindlimbs are recruited for force production, as the wings are much more powerful than the legs. This ability to run seems to have evolved independently within the bat lineage.
Vampire bats use infrared radiation to locate blood hotspots on their prey, according to a study published in Nature. The infrared signals are received through the bats' three 1mm-diameter leaf pits, which are located around their noses and can change direction when needed. The only other vertebrates capable of detecting infrared radiation are boas, pythons and pit vipers, all of which have pit organs. A mass of nerve cells, called the trigeminal ganglia (TG), which are associated with the trigeminal nerves responsible for causing sensations in the face, stimulate the leaf pits. The TG of vampire bats have large-diameter neurons, similar to those of pit-bearing snakes, while fruit bats have much smaller trigeminal ganglia.
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