Rats Filmed Snatching Bats From Air
Posted2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
science.orgSciencestoryHigh profile
calmmixed
Debate
60/100
WildlifePredationZoology
Key topics
Wildlife
Predation
Zoology
Rats have been filmed snatching bats from the air, highlighting their predatory behavior and raising concerns about disease transmission, while sparking discussions about rat behavior and ecology.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
5d
Peak period
48
120-132h
Avg / period
17.8
Comment distribution89 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 89 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 28, 2025 at 4:29 AM EDT
2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 2, 2025 at 11:49 AM EST
5d after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
48 comments in 120-132h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 5, 2025 at 11:06 AM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45730366Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 5:33:13 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Maybe get some sticky fly paper though.
For some reason everybody in my city is proudly boasting bout the recent large capybara population... And again, for some reason those same people didn't react well when jaguars decided to show up in the urban area.
People are stupid.
Fortunately, the pine snakes only try to move into our house and sheds once or twice a year or so.
Is this the sort of organisation that would be negatively impacted by publishing unverified stories?
If so, what is the likelihood that the content is just Sora?
I thought of game theory initially because I framed the situation as a repeated game, where every article published is a new round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeated_game
But then I went and muddied it with the word "likelihood" :)
FOH with that FUD, if you care about corruption go after the obvious examples instead of making up new ones.
There are tech-related ways to tell for now but eventually it's going to come back to this.
AKA "Provenance" but digital, for those who want to look at existing methodologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provenance
There is enough detail there to book a trip to Germany and set up infrared cameras if we are so inclined, repeatability is a large part of science.
- the rats are effectively as blind as the bat in the dark, are they relying purely on sound and air currents to gauge their attack?
- and what a fantastic new path for pathogen transmission.
Are they? Aren't rats nocturnal in the first place, meaning evolution should have given them some benefit in that environment? AFAIK, rats have pretty OK contrast/motion detection even in low light situations.
I guess if "in the dark" means "low light" or "total darkness". You're probably right for "total darkness" but if it's "low light", I think the rats would "see" better than the bats.
Presumably it's been there for a long time and we just noticed.
As a previous commenter noted, rats are an invasive species in the expanding human/wildland interface. So they will be encountering novel bat viruses.
There may be other existing bat to human transmission paths, but maybe not....
We just noticed bat snatching. I doubt it's new discovery that rats also eat bats whenever the opportunity comes knocking.
Also: Bats -> rats -> (house) cats -> humans.
One such study’s key paragraph…
> While uncommon for coronaviruses of bats, furin cleavage sites are commonly found in coronaviruses of rodents and it is perhaps fitting to note that proteolytic processing of the coronavirus spike protein was first recognized in the model rodent coronavirus, murine hepatitis virus, MHV-A59 [53], with later analyses demonstrating the importance of furin for the proteolytic cleavage and function of its spike protein [54].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235277142...
Edit, in fact the paper you link says exactly what I said I think? Rodent coronaviruses already evolved to use furin long ago. I think this paper just makes it even less likely tbh.
The more exposure between these populations the higher the likelihood that a crossover event occurs.
Also to be super clear, I'm not saying rats are immune to bat viruses, I'm just saying in reality it's is too divergent for functional crossspecies transmission and both rats and bats already have their own established, evolved coronavirus ecosystems that solve the same problems (like furin cleavage above). It seems to me near impossible it could actually happen.
The virus doesn’t need to make the animal sick to increase its human transmission risk, it just needs to infect its cells and be in the same host as other circulating viruses to get the crossover and recombination events.
From early host analysis,
> For a precursor virus to acquire the genomic features suitable for human ACE2 receptor binding, an animal host would likely have to have a high population density to allow natural selection to proceed efficiently (27). It is interesting to note that rodent betacoronaviruses have the polybasic cleavage site (38). Considering the above, surveillance and whole genomic analysis of CoVs from rodents are important to elucidate whether these species have any role in the transmission cycle of the virus and to detect the emergence of possible recombinants involving CoVs from these species and those from bats. However, there is not yet any evidence on the role of rodents or squirrels as intermediate hosts.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7297130/
Or more direct examination of the FCS issue between rats and bats:
> Here, we examine the spike protein across coronaviruses identified in both bat and rodent species and address the role of furin as an activating protease. Utilizing two publicly available furin prediction algorithms (ProP and PiTou) and based on spike sequences reported in GenBank, we show that the S1/S2 furin cleavage site is typically not present in bat virus spike proteins but is common in rodent-associated sequences, and suggest this may have implications for zoonotic transfer. We provide a phylogenetic history of the Embecoviruses (betacoronavirus lineage 2a), including context for the use of furin as an activating protease for the viral spike protein. From a One Health perspective, continued rodent surveillance should be an important consideration in uncovering novel circulating coronaviruses.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235277142...
A possible scenario for such transmission may include bats infected with HKU2-like CoVs preying on insects near pig facilities, dropping contaminated feces that were later introduced into the pens somehow, by pig feed or some kind of animal (Fig. 4). According to our onsite observation in 2017, rodents were frequently visible in these pig farms. Notably, bat HKU2-like CoVs are clustered with rat CoVs in the genus Alphacoronavirus (Fig. 3). As we found that SeACoV infects different cell lines originating from rodents, and mice may be susceptible to SeACoV experimental infection (Yang et al., 2019b), we hypothesize that in such field conditions, rodents (especially wild rats) in the farms may eat pig feed contaminated by bat feces, becoming carriers of SeACoV (Fig. 4). Alternatively, if pigs became infected and shed SeACoV-positive feces, the virus could begin circulating in pig facilities. Contamination of pig feed, pig feces and water supplies by rodents could accumulate and develop into outbreaks of diarrhea in neonatal piglets (Fig. 4). Future studies on identifying HKU2-like CoV positive samples in rodents near pig farms are warranted to test this hypothesis.
Many rat coronaviruses are closer evolutionarily to specific bat coronaviruses than other closely related bat coronaviruses;
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S01681702193067...
Bats have crazy immune systems that let them harbor all kinds of nasty stuff without it killing them on account of their unclean communal living habitat. Bats are in close contact where waste and bodily fluids are constantly coming into contact with other members, and these all carry pathogens.
Bat immune systems evolved as a defense mechanism. Bat viral loads are high, and the viruses get to evolve rapidly, come into contact with other virus genomes, and essentially explore the state space of potential virus genomes quickly. Constantly evolving novel glycoproteins, etc. Bats are essentially a virus optimization battleground.
These rats are an invasive species (to the cave) that also live in close proximity to humans. They've just been discovered hunting bats, meaning they're coming into close contact with bat viruses and potentially serving to introduce these into rat and, possibly subsequently, human populations.
Additionally, if the viruses can jump to rats, they're in a state where they could already be primed to infect us.
Bat viruses are no joke. Since our immune systems aren't familiar with novel viruses, and the viruses aren't adapted to not kill their human hosts at first, novel bat viruses can do a lot of harm.
I have no doubt. Cats have an incredible prey drive, and it would be down right batty for them to have some sort of hardwiring to avoid bats when they happily attack moths who have a similar flight pattern. I haven’t personally seen one catch a bat, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all. A cursory search says indicates it happens.
Although for whatever reason I would be more concerned about a dog finding, rubbing in and eating a dead bat. I mean I don’t know what percentage of bats die while out, but it can’t be zero, and dogs—especially spitz-types—are remarkable at finding dead animals. Now that I think of it, I could easily imagine a person getting direct exposure to diseased bat remains through that vector. People typically put their hands on the shoulders of dogs and think little of it.
After seeing a street cat kill a scorpion I don't really think they're afraid of much.
My cat has a deeply-wired fear of raptors. Bats flutter around closer to the ground. But maybe bats benefit from that conflation?
More anecdotally, I knew a cat that brought in bats almost daily, which is why the owner had her vaccinated against rabies (classical rabies RABV has been extirpated here).
on the bright side and if history is of any help, as long as future-to-be-debarred "experts" aren't doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses while lying about it, we don't have much to fear.
Official US Congress report, mandated under Biden and whose results came under Biden, says the virus has "characteristic not found in nature" and that a lab-leak is the most likely source:
https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...
And Peter Daszak has been debarred, defunded and prevented from ever receiving funding from the US again.
I'm more worried about humans lying and humans siding with lying humans to then lie some more, worldwide, to the public --for years before the truth finally came up to light-- much more than I'm about rats attacking bats.
You missed the part where the original mandate was along party lines with Democrats supporting it and Republicans not, to investigate how the Trump administration handled the pandemic response. Republicans took control of the House and then redefined the agenda to be their own partisan viewpoint, to confirm what they already believed about gain-of-function and lab leak theories. They produced a nice Big Beautiful Report with a debatable connection to facts, which is not surprising in the least.
> before the truth finally came up to light
If you are looking to politicians for the truth...
I wouldn't be so confident. HIV and Ebola came from the wild. Bird Flu also has the potential to be really bad.
https://youtu.be/ZnYNmGMsU18
“And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.”
― Lewis Carroll Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
I can't access the paper to check if they verified it, but given there is a strong IR light, and even humans can see IR light if strong enough (and close enough in frequency, which is typically true for IR illumination for cameras), I wonder if that is true.
Textbook example of the blind eating the blind.