https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJCYUf3IhSs
Experiments with vampire bats running on treadmills have revealed that they have a very unusual way of getting energy from protein because of their specialized diet.
Most mammals derive most of their energy for exercise from fat and stored sugars, but three species of vampire bats feed on blood taken from their victims, which is rich in protein and low in fat and sugar. I’m alive. Therefore, it is unclear how an animal’s metabolism works because the amino acids that make up proteins typically provide less than 10 percent of the energy during animal exercise.
To learn more about metabolism, Kenneth Welch and Julia Rossi At the University of Toronto, Canada, we studied 24 adult common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) was captured in Belize. The bats were fed cow blood containing amino acids labeled with carbon atoms and placed on a treadmill in a small box.
The bats’ metabolic rates were measured by tracking their oxygen intake and carbon dioxide exhalation while running on a treadmill at speeds of up to 30 meters per minute. By analyzing carbon isotopes in exhaled breath, researchers discovered that humans derive their energy from recent meals rather than stored fat or sugar.
Welch came up with the idea 20 years ago when he studied how hummingbirds use the sugars in flower nectar and discovered similarities with nectar-sucking bats. He knew that tsetse flies (Glossina morsitans) are unusual in that they feed on blood and do not use fat or carbohydrates, but instead protein, and I wondered if vampire bats were similar.
But while hummingbirds and some nectar bats can hover mid-flight, making experiments possible without large and expensive wind tunnels, vampire bats cannot. However, they have the ability to run at high speeds, which they use to track prey on the ground, allowing Welch and Rossi to run through their paces on a treadmill instead.
Deriving most of its energy from amino acids is unusual in the animal kingdom and is limited to blood-sucking insects, emperor penguins, and bears during long periods of fasting and hibernation. “What’s different here is that this animal seems to be doing the same thing every day of the year when it feeds, making use of the protein found in the blood meal it ingested just minutes before. ” says Welch. “That’s the real difference between these animals and most of us humans.”
While most animals can store nutrients by converting them into sugars and fats, vampire bats have evolved a different strategy that makes them much more sensitive to starvation—in fact, they can starve in as little as 24 hours without feeding. That puts you at risk, Welch said. To compensate for this, bats develop strong social bonds, and when a member of the group cannot find food, they share a meal with each other, giving some of their blood to another to maintain it. Spit it back into the bat’s mouth.
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